Episode 1866: MP Hogan

Zain 0:01

This is Strategist episode 1866. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter and Corey Hogan. Oh my goodness, he is here. His drink is here. And with

Zain 0:15

drink and scene, that right there, folks, was the greatest practical joke of all time. It took us one month, a lot of money, but

Zain 0:30

but we staged it perfectly. We did. Carter, let's talk about

Zain 0:33

about the practice. Got your asses.

Zain 0:36

Do they think he's an MP, Carter? These fucking people are so stupid.

Corey 0:43

so dumb. Oh, no, no, no. They are so dumb. No, no, no, no.

Zain 0:45

no. Okay, here we go. Here we go. Oh, here we go.

Zain 0:47

You saw my eye already.

Corey 0:48

already. Now I remember and I'm an MP. And I realize maybe I should take a more professional approach to this.

Zain 0:54

this. Corey, your method process was excellent in the

Zain 0:57

But like Daniel Day in the break room, you can fucking knock it off now. You are not an MP. We need to just make sure that people understand the real truth, that Corey Hogan has not been elected. Well,

Corey 1:08

fact, I have been. You know what? There's paperwork and everything. thing i got like parliament for emails so it's a thing now yeah

Corey 1:15

so the joke continues i like you know

Zain 1:17

about you is the dedication cory let's

Corey 1:20

let's just let's just keep it going another year or two this joke at the very least huh the very least carter

Corey 1:27

he is an mp

Corey 1:30

which is what he is

Zain 1:31

is a member of technically mp

Corey 1:32

mp elect until i'm sworn in oh that's

Zain 1:34

that's right i saw that banner the other day on television as they kind of filmed you with the boomer camera on the ground look look it up right at your genitals to be like, look at this guy ready to represent Calgary Confederacy. I'm so glad

Zain 1:47

glad I came back one

Corey 1:48

one final time onto the podcast. Is this one final? I don't know. We should talk about that at some point. This is the accountability

Corey 1:55

by the way. This is the accountability episode. Just so people know. Do you want to explain what the accountability episode is? I

Zain 2:01

I feel like we've done enough of them. But yeah, Carter, how about you explain? Because recently you've been held accountable. Subjected

Corey 2:06

Subjected to them a lot, yeah.

Carter 2:07

Not really, it's me who gets tased. I've escaped mine,

Zain 2:09

mine, so there you go.

Carter 2:10

Yeah. Well, so after every election, one of us participates in it, except Zane. We have to face the board of the Strategist Media Corporation and stand accountable as to our performance. Win, lose, or draw, we come back before the board of directors and we account for our behavior. And in this particular case, we're going to be accounting for Corey Hogan's behavior as a candidate.

Zain 2:41

Sorry, I'm a little confused. Is this Corey Hogan's behavior, or is this how I helped Corey Hogan become the Member of Parliament?

Zain 2:48

Sorry, I asked you. What would we do without you, Zane?

Carter 2:51

Well, I left myself out, Zane. I figured that you and I gave about equal effort. So, you know, this

Carter 2:57

this is really Corey's moment. I'd

Zain 2:58

I'd say as it relates to optically looking like you did more, you definitely won that race. I

Carter 3:05

I did look like I did more. You definitely

Zain 3:07

definitely look like you did more.

Carter 3:08

Inside was no Zane.

Corey 3:12

Zane, Stephen definitely drank more coffee in the campaign office than you. There's no question about that. Yeah, Carter's just walking around terrorizing

Zain 3:20

Let's talk about all of it. Are you okay to talk about all of it? Sure. Where do you want to start, Mr. Hogan? You have, or sorry, is it Mr. Hogan, MP-elect Hogan, or should we just go with the Right Honourable at this point? I don't know if, Carter, are you knocking on wood when I say that?

Carter 3:35

No, I'm not. Come on, if he doesn't make cabinet, then I think there's a chance. Yeah, but right honorable

Corey 3:41

honorable is like the prime minister, you guys know that. Yeah,

Carter 3:43

Yeah, I know, but it's the honorable. We have to refer to you as the honorable if you're the minister. Okay, well, I'm

Zain 3:47

I'm going to refer you to his honor. Hey,

Zain 3:51

job getting the king. You guys did a great job getting the king. Yeah, all me,

Corey 3:55

me, I think. I'm pretty sure all me. The MP-elect from Calgary Confederation. That's right. He

Zain 3:59

He heard you were there. I mean, he heard Confederation was worth fighting for. And he

Zain 4:04

said, let me get my ass onto a plane.

Corey 4:06

plane. I guess it's worth fighting for. Are you going to get him to sign your sign?

Corey 4:11

Well, you know, I wasn't going to, but that's weird enough. I just might now. No, no. You get him to sign your sign. It's probably a breach of several royal-like norms to do that. We can find out

Zain 4:22

out what the norms are. Corey Hogan, where do you want to start? You are indeed a member-elect of Parliament. Yes, I am. Do you want to start with where the campaign began? again because we have done the episode in which you launched and we held you accountable for your launch uh which was the press release in the irish

Corey 4:37

irish stew where do you want to start we can why don't we go back to that day and just ever so slightly before do you want to

Zain 4:42

to go before yeah

Corey 4:43

well i don't know if we need to go like the whole thing before but start with birth okay

Corey 4:47

okay i was born on a cold winter night in ottawa ontario december 12th and

Corey 4:52

and um yada yada yada here i am right but more

Corey 4:56

more recently recently as we're getting into the election uh we've already talked about how it was a pretty quick thing how i ended up being a candidate at very last minute but i do want to talk about the friday where i got the phone call from the election chair her name's kathy and she basically said hey um the you know the the current

Corey 5:15

current candidate thomas keeper he's out it'll be public in about an hour you said if you were gonna run it would be in calgary confederation well if you mean it here we go you know if this is what you want to do here you go and i was at the time on my way to go have lunch with steven we didn't invite using uh

Corey 5:33

mostly i'd added all

Zain 5:33

all my value on the front end yeah

Corey 5:35

yeah yeah it was already like because we already knew it would be just too long no so i went to have lunch with steven and we were going to be meeting up in the northeast but then we ultimately ended up uh me going to steven's house right and we just sat down and steven to your great credit was like okay well let's just make the list of everything you need you know you'll need signs you'll need literature you'll need buttons you'll need to order these things which means you need suppliers you need to have and like an office like just like all of it and it's not an exaggeration to say like less than an hour later it kind of felt like there was a real campaign that was taking form we

Carter 6:09

we were done oh

Corey 6:11

carter was in his absolute element he's like calling suppliers and just kind of like grinding them on like prices and timelines like right in front he's like no no we're gonna need it sooner you know no no no and i can't give you the creative until you know everything's approved and all of this but i i mean i'm really grateful i just want to say steven for that first of all because like it wouldn't really happen but we were farming out people to write content we were identifying other volunteers like everything was sort of just all of a sudden happening and and i'm in the green light process at this point it's just like holy shit okay now this is kind of a campaign and we've talked about how that took a little bit longer uh in no small part because i i had to be interviewed by colin colin lawn yeah we talked about life now but

Corey 6:51

but um but yeah and then uh then we found ourselves on monday night i had been approved and uh we realized that that meant the information was going to come out on april 1st so i

Corey 7:02

i want to give a bit of a shout out uh to the press release launching me here which i did not write um but

Corey 7:09

but i did really appreciate how a it went out on april fool's day so it confused the hell out of people but what really confused them is at the end like it was like almost like they were playing it straight until the end and then it talked about me winning an irish stew competition which

Corey 7:23

which is true but it led to many many people wondering whether it was actually real that i was i was running for office

Zain 7:31

office talk to me cory about and carter i guess you're part of this talk to me about the strategy of burning three to five days and and confusing people about whether cory's a real candidate it's

Zain 7:39

it's unconventional but talk to me about that all

Carter 7:42

all that really matters is getting people talking about you and

Carter 7:45

and if they're talking about you wondering if you're in or you're out it has the same impact as uh because

Carter 7:50

because they probably wouldn't have talked about them otherwise i mean most of the media know them so

Carter 7:54

so they were probably going to be like ah not

Carter 7:57

not not a real star candidate just one rung

Corey 7:58

rung below a star candidate one

Carter 7:59

one one rung below a star candidate oh

Zain 8:02

oh that's that's how yeah that's how i define you in fact i think those are my words yeah

Corey 8:07

almost like they were on on public record somewhere. Yeah. Oh, speaking of public record, Corey, who's doing the sweep of all your previous comments? No, no. Let's not even joke about that. But the...

Corey 8:21

You can already see he's

Corey 8:23

Carter. Yeah, listen, because

Corey 8:24

the member of parliament.

Corey 8:26

Elect. That's right. You

Zain 8:27

You can literally say anything about anyone right now. You've called Carter an asshole as a candidate. So you can call Carter an asshole as a MP elect right now. And I'm going to give you a free shot to do it right now um all you have to do is say steven carter my constituent is an asshole

Corey 8:43

asshole well he uh that's a slow pitch over the plate i think i would actually gain a few votes saying it but i'm still gonna refrain um no so like carter's right like one of the things that was interesting about it going out that way is it really did create quite a buzz you know like people were talking about it there was you know the way social media engagement works of course like Like, the conversation drives the content as much as anything else. So, it wasn't, like, planned. Like, that just happened to be the day we knew this was all coming out. But I definitely think it

Corey 9:13

worked to our advantage.

Corey 9:15

But if you want to move to kind of the next step here, and we can jump into the strategy here. I

Zain 9:19

I kind of do, but maybe this is the appropriate moment to talk about what we were talking about last episode without you on it. which is getting your take about the growth of the campaign from day one, just all the people kind of coming around, and the podcast's importance. You can talk about that now, or you could talk about that as you talk about the next phase, but I do want you to address it at some point.

Corey 9:39

Yeah, I think in some ways they're inextricably linked, right? Within,

Corey 9:44

even before that April 1st date, because of course, when it became clear that I was going to be running, we were talking to people. It was, you know, the team was growing. um and

Corey 9:54

ended up in a place i felt at least around day two like tons and tons of volunteers lots of interest uh really big campaign team probably five or six people who could have been campaign manager on the team ultimately that was a role that heather mccray uh led you know steven's wife and uh or maybe i think more accurately we'll start referring to steven as heather's husband but exactly i

Carter 10:16

i think that's better i think it's better for all of us but

Zain 10:20

Carter. What do you mean by that? I

Carter 10:22

better that she has a bigger identity than I do. She held together

Corey 10:28

together like a very, you know, it's not easy to manage a bunch of people who could be managers in their own right. I guess that's what I would say and did a really good job. But before that moment, when there was just a bunch of people going out doing stuff, and a bunch of volunteers coming in, and a bunch of stuff that was in varying states of happening, or should have happened, or hadn't happened, I'll totally tell you, like on day two or three, if you had given me a time machine on day three, and said, you can go back in time and not run, I probably would have taken it.

Corey 10:57

And it wasn't because there weren't volunteers, and it's not because there wasn't money. The volunteers and the money came in big

Corey 11:02

big time. Like right away. Yeah,

Corey 11:04

like tons of it, just tons of it. and it was because it just all of a sudden felt like there's not enough time this is insane i've got fewer than four weeks to build no not just to win to build something from nothing and then have that something win right that is an insane amount of time these are the kind of things that are usually built in months if not years and we were planning to do it like

Corey 11:27

like it just seemed like the height of hubris at around day two or three when we still didn't have the office open you know Nobody even had the time to kind of go pick it up. There were a bunch of things falling through the cracks because we didn't have a campaign manager identified there yet. And at that moment, if you had offered me that trade, I would have taken that trade. But of course, that's not how real life works. And it passed quickly. By the next day, the office is open, and all of a sudden, it's a massive hub of activity. All of a sudden, the literature has shown up. The signs are popping up all over the area.

Corey 11:56

It was incredible how fast it happened, but it was so daunting to think about how fast it had to happen.

Zain 12:02

Carter, jump in here. You obviously, you know, despite the fact that I undercut you constantly, and I was going to say needlessly, but that part's not true. No, that's not true. No, it's needed. It's needed. It's absolutely needed. You are intimately involved in this campaign, as much as I joke about it. Talk to me about the dynamic of Candidate Corey, a good friend of yours, running when he's used to being you on a campaign, the you of a campaign sort of thing. So talk to me about that dynamic and how you observed it from your lens. From that day one, take me back to that lunch that I wasn't invited at, and then subsequently to all the other things I wasn't invited at. Take me through all those things and how Corey—

Corey 12:42

Corey— Oh, no, no. You were invited to all of them.

Corey 12:45

The number of times I called you and you're like, I'm sorry, I'm busy. I'm going to call you back in five minutes. Now, now— And then four days would pass.

Zain 12:51

Election day, I was at Ikea.

Corey 12:55

Okay? That's true. I

Zain 12:56

I was doing important work.

Corey 12:57

work. And you were also at the victory party. Yeah, exactly.

Zain 13:02

was ready to be a tribute by media. Tell them about my role.

Zain 13:08

told you I'd take all the credit. Carter, tell

Zain 13:10

tell us about seeing Corey in this light.

Carter 13:13

Well, Candidate Corey was kind of hilarious because Candidate Corey knows all of the steps and knows all of the pieces. But? Because he's a strategist and ultimately has a tremendous amount of experience working on his side. and so

Carter 13:28

so he had a really high level of understanding of when he was being insane

Corey 13:34

did but it didn't stop it from happening he

Carter 13:36

he was still being insane there was one particular um broad broadcast message that we put out and like

Zain 13:43

like what do you mean like like i'm like an ivr yeah

Carter 13:45

like an ivr so broadcast voice recording message and and uh cory voiced Corey voiced it. We wrote it. We were having difficulty getting a supplier. It took some time. Finally got through several script revisions and wound up with a good supplier. And then everything kind of just was – it took me probably a week and a half. It was probably one of the longest things that we took to get done on this entire campaign. And frankly, it

Carter 14:14

it was just another voice broadcast. It was an absolute nothing burger. burger but everything that we tried to do on it it just ran into an obstacle and i and i basically would go back to cory and say man

Carter 14:27

it's just not worth it it's not worth it like this is a this is a nothing burger and he'd be like the entire campaign hinges on this one broadcast this

Corey 14:36

little bit of a little bit of sarcasm and self-awareness

Carter 14:39

-awareness no you were like this is the most without this the campaign may not work okay everything hinges together on this that's literally what you said to me at least two occasions we're holding we're holding you

Corey 14:53

he's not wrong you go insane as a candidate right like you you see these things when you're a campaign manager or a campaign strategist and and you just they bother you so immensely right there's these fixations on these things right where a candidate's just like if this thing's not going well everything's going badly like it's like the brown m&ms but for candidates

Corey 15:12

candidates candidates every candidate i've ever worked with has had one of these like the one thing they think if you do this we win and if you fail at this we all fail and it's your fault right were you

Zain 15:23

you cognizant of not being that candidate i

Corey 15:24

i was yeah i really didn't want to be that candidate and i think for the most part i wasn't that candidate but there were moments that four weeks there were moments i kind of lost my mind oh

Carter 15:33

oh yeah you should have seen them on the ndp flyer you

Carter 15:36

you know essentially the lend us your vote flyer that we did we

Corey 15:39

we did not lend you vote just vote just vote

Carter 15:42

but it was essentially lend us your vote and uh cory the

Carter 15:47

first draft came out and cory's like no and basically redesigned the whole piece this is something i forgot about that

Carter 15:54

that we had 500 copies made this is not a an insurmountable piece of the of the puzzle we dropped about 140 000 pieces of literature cory got this one piece of literature that we dropped 500 copies of and he was late stayed up late one night to redesign it to make it look the way he wanted it to look pretty

Corey 16:13

pretty nice at the end though right did look

Carter 16:15

look nice it was your design wasn't the flaw your

Carter 16:19

your flaw was as a candidate rewriting and redesigning the whole yeah that's

Corey 16:22

that's very true so you have the fixations as the candidate the other thing you have and i think it's kind of closely related is like the the The brainwave, I'll call it, right? And as a campaign manager, you're always like, oh, fuck, another brainwave.

Corey 16:37

And where it's just this idea where you think, okay, everybody drop what they're doing, which is required to win the campaign, and just go do this one thing. What

Corey 16:46

was your one thing?

Corey 16:47

might have actually been that flyer right but uh there were there were more than one of those there'd be times where i'd just be like what about this what about this meeting how are we doing this and again i think to steven's point your point zane i knew when i was doing it like there was it's like part of my brain was holding the other part of my brain hostage it's like you don't need this is not the big deal you think it is and then the other part's like screw you other part of the brain we're gonna do this and we're gonna do this now i'm driving the bus i'm am the captain now right and uh and

Corey 17:16

and so you end up doing a few things like that along the way but

Corey 17:21

carter give him a grade how

Zain 17:22

how did cory do as a candidate as

Zain 17:25

was what's cory's candidate grading that you're going to give him and on a scale of and i'm just to be glad on a scale of one to ten it's a scale that you may not have heard of before yeah

Carter 17:34

yeah on a scale of one to ten he was a definite a minus um he he had the ability to his his video shoots were really solid he did some excellent video shoots his ideas weren't off the wall crazy like he came up with the slogan which is super important coming up with confederation we'll talk about

Carter 17:52

second worth fighting for that was that was him and everybody um felt

Carter 17:58

felt pretty you know dedicated to him there was no uh why about i don't know i was trying to get to the bottom of it why

Zain 18:05

why like i've listened to this podcast i've been here for a long time why they thought

Carter 18:08

he was the only one that

Zain 18:09

that was was able to stay away i guess it's a question it

Carter 18:11

it was a star and

Carter 18:12

it was uh it was crazy oh i

Zain 18:14

i like the quotes there okay so i thought he was one rung below a star they thought he was okay so it's just misinterpretation it was weird but

Zain 18:21

but you know we he

Carter 18:22

he everybody wanted to see him people came into the office they wanted to see him the volunteers wanted to see him there was a tremendous number of pictures being taken with the guy um he was a you know he was basically a celebrity how

Zain 18:34

how was that for you hogan like

Zain 18:36

like the podcast has given and i think this part you may not disagree with from the last episode but the podcast has given us like very niche alberta western canadian specific political fame to a degree well

Zain 18:47

well and but this is more than that yeah unless you disagree with even my premise i sort of disagree that it i think

Corey 18:53

think you're selling us short a little bit zane and i guess selling you guys short as i move on to this next thing but like even on cbc's coverage on election night when the first time i popped up on the screen rosemary barton's like that's a name political nerds will know you know and it's just like there There was a certain, you know, cachet from the podcast and you

Corey 19:10

you have this longstanding relationship with the listeners. I heard you guys talking about it, but we talk to people for literally hundreds of hours about our views on things and talking about things. And you can't help but get to know people a little bit over that and really have a bit of an understanding. It's like, it's asymmetrical. I always feel like, oh, you've heard me talk a lot. i i wish i could hear you talk a little bit more you know so much more it likes makes the conversation like they've just got just so much more information but but there's no question in my mind and i kind of jumped past it because i meandered but the podcast and the podcast community was such an enormous part of the story here like an enormous part yeah hundreds of volunteers but beyond the volunteers the cred and and i like i could think of very specific doors that i was was talking to people and it was not just a couple it was a lot where it'd be like oh i've heard of you and i'd be like oh you listen to the podcast oh i don't listen but my friend listens and they say you're great oh that's

Corey 20:12

and and i think that when you think about it not just in terms of our listenership which is really big for a podcast as much as we joke about it and all of that right it's also the people in their immediate orbit like of those 30 000 people who listen to the podcast it's the 10 people they're gonna say can you believe this fucking guy's running i've I've heard him for hundreds of hours. Right, or the casual listener

Zain 20:31

listener in addition to that. Exactly.

Corey 20:33

Exactly. And, you know, the number of people who'd say, not

Corey 20:36

not just the podcast, but like, I heard you on West of Center, or I've seen you on CBC, or I read you in this article or whatnot. Yeah.

Corey 20:43

You would get that

Corey 20:44

A lot, yeah. Interesting. You know, it was, especially Calgary Confederation. See,

Zain 20:50

See, my theory was the podcast was great at galvanizing volunteers for you.

Zain 20:58

that people would be like, oh, if Corey's doing something, I've gotten to know Corey over dozens or hundreds of hours over the last number of years. I'm showing up to help that guy. That is not surprising to me. In fact, I think if any of us would have run, we would have probably had that. But the fact that people know you from a tangential perspective, that I think is an interesting insight. Carter, did that surprise you too? Because maybe I have sold not our podcast, But this impact of a community like this, let me put it that way, from a strategy perspective a bit short, were you surprised by folks behind the door, not just the ones coming alongside Corey, having name recognition and community recognition and understanding a bit of profile?

Carter 21:37

Yeah, I mean, it was a bit beyond the expectation. It was,

Zain 21:41

was, wasn't it? Yeah,

Carter 21:42

Yeah, it's surprising when, you know, it is surprising when we run into listeners. It's even more surprising when we run into people who are tangentially related to the listeners, when there's people who don't listen but still know our names. That's

Carter 21:58

You know, Corey became kind of the lightning

Carter 22:02

lightning rod for that. And so, you know, we wound up with quite a few podcast listeners. We also wound up with a lot of people who didn't listen to the podcast.

Carter 22:10

no idea who it was. Yeah, yeah. Which is what

Zain 22:12

what I'd expect, nine and a half out of ten. Yeah,

Corey 22:14

Yeah, and not just, I don't think it was just people who had no idea who I was. There were also individuals who, for example, knew who I was, but from different walks of life. Like, you know, like the podcast was a huge component, but I also do want to underline, like, I live here, I work here, I work for- Oh, you contain multitudes.

Zain 22:34

And this brings us to our new segment, Corey Hogan, Cabinet Pitch. Go ahead, Corey. Yeah, please go ahead. No,

Corey 22:39

No, listen, man, I, until, well, I'm still technically, but like until two days ago when I resigned, I was vice president at the University of Calgary, which is probably the biggest individual organization

Corey 22:50

organization within, in fact, I know it is, within the city or Calgary Confederation, right? Right, right.

Corey 22:57

So, there is also that, right? Like the thousands of people that I've interacted with there, too.

Zain 23:03

Carter, okay, over to you. You have Corey running as a candidate. That's an A-minus. You've got this high-level name recognition. I got to ask you, though, before I get into what else you guys did, because there's a lot I want to talk about. What surprised you in a potentially, not negative way, but what was an opportunity that didn't fully kind of come to fruition? And I fully acknowledge that for anyone who was jumping into this campaign, Payne, unless you were on this track for the last two

Zain 23:31

two years, just waiting, which Corey was not, as we've discussed, what was something that just did not click? I'm curious, because a lot seemed to have clicked. It may have given you guys a further re-appreciation of what you can do in a short amount of time, which I think the Carney leadership race did for us from an outside perspective. This

Zain 23:48

This race probably did for you in an intimate perspective. But what didn't click? And then I want to get to the heart of the question around appreciation of timelines, so to speak. Yeah,

Carter 23:56

Yeah, it's really interesting. I'm not sure that anything didn't click. Why do you think that is? Well, one thing I was surprised by was the lack of connection between us, Skyview, McKnight, and Center. As campaigns. As campaigns. We were absolutely on an island.

Zain 24:12

Like viable campaigns that were supposed to win or had a good shot at winning.

Zain 24:17

Just so people who are not from the area understand why you're mentioning those. Yeah.

Carter 24:20

Yeah. So from those four campaigns that were all supposed to be competitive and at least three were supposed to win. in. One would have thought that there maybe would have been some note comparisons, things that are working in different ridings, things that, you know, some comparisons of, okay, how are you contrasting? How are you, you know, doing the comparisons? Are you featuring your candidate in the front row? Are you putting Mark Carney in the front row? What is it that you're actually trying to achieve here? And there was, I think, zero of that, Corey. I mean, there was virtually none of that even when cory was entering after the first week of campaigning so that did surprise me i i thought that we would see more collective uh work together with everybody but instead um we

Carter 25:08

we had ran a very independent campaign and that very independent campaign took choices that were very

Carter 25:15

very dissimilar or like very unrelated to the other three campaigns that were uh quote quote-unquote, competitive.

Zain 25:22

Speak to me about that, Corey, and I think it's a good time to mention the Confederation is What's Fighting For tagline as well, and its genesis and its impact and meaning on the campaign when we talk about incongruity or just doing things differently, for lack of a better term. So the main question is, what surprised you? And then let's hit on the Confederation's What's Fighting For. Yeah,

Corey 25:40

Yeah, why don't I kind of build on the coordination point? And look, I really, really want to tell you, like, there are good reasons for this. The Liberal Party of Canada has been running flat since the fall. I don't want to be shitty to anybody who's worked really, really hard. But you think about they had a leadership to run, and then they immediately ran into an election. But yeah,

Corey 26:00

yeah, some of the coordination was a bit wild. And I'll just give two examples that sort of made me laugh. But if I was a different kind of candidate in a different kind of circumstance, it would actually probably make me angry. The first is the Liberal Party creates a campaign manual for each of the candidates. and it's customized like it says these are your vote targets these are the things you need really yeah yeah and

Zain 26:21

said they send it oh that's interesting yeah they sent it like i'm

Corey 26:24

i'm sure 99 of the content is common between it but yeah you know some of it's specific

Corey 26:28

to like what your vote target quite the lift jesus well

Corey 26:31

well sure and you know what i got mine the friday before the election so i

Corey 26:38

i was here impressed being

Corey 26:40

that's an amazing document like if i was if If I was sitting there being like, oh, I better figure out how to tell my candidate's story and I better identify donors and all of that. Like if I was waiting for this thing and I got it on the Friday, I mean, for me, it was just kind of funny. It was more like, why bother? Like, you have to know, like if this shows up, well, I'm going to change my whole campaign in a weekend. And then- I have to ask how it showed up. Was this like a piece of mail that came to you? Yeah, it was like couriered. It was like, anyways, I, and then- Someone

Carter 27:06

Someone sent the 12 dollars to send it to us. Pretty funny to me. Yeah, it's the level

Zain 27:10

level of, like if someone was just

Corey 27:12

just like, let me just email it,

Zain 27:12

it, even though it's late better now than ever yeah no it was like

Corey 27:18

it even funnier that's

Zain 27:18

that's why i think it's important for

Corey 27:20

for people to know well

Corey 27:20

well the other thing is there's this thing called the writing services package and in 2025 most of it really is about the digital tools that you get access to but there are like components such as buttons and posters of the leader and just generic liberal pop-up banners and stuff like that great for you

Corey 27:38

they'll do it for you and it comes in a number of packages and the first package i got about a week into of the campaign was just plastic sleeves for id badges no nothing else no lanyards nothing like that about a week later i get couriered from staples a bunch of stickers that say authorized by the official agent for the liberal party of canada i don't know what they're for they just show up and tuesday the day after the election the rest of the writing service package shut up okay

Zain 28:10

you may not want to be here for this part cory

Zain 28:14

there four ridings around

Zain 28:16

around the country that

Zain 28:18

that were waiting for this package that should have maybe won to form the majority i tell you that just did not no cory none of

Zain 28:27

of carter and i will talk about this later none of these things other

Corey 28:31

other candidates were vital yeah

Corey 28:33

yeah none of these things were vital and other candidates actually did get their packages at different times i understand i understand and

Zain 28:38

and i see i let's just let's just assume they thought you didn't need it uh but did that's that didn't say anything like like nothing meaningful to you other than the fact that no this was a party flat out unless

Corey 28:48

unless you want to make a broader everyone everyone was going nuts and i will say like the the local the local field organizers were so phenomenal and so helpful to us right and who

Zain 28:59

are these people these are people that that yeah the

Corey 29:01

the party party of canada Right, and they assigned to different campuses. Yeah, so, like, Morgan and Tyler and, you know, from an election chair point, Kathy, like, wonderful. They were really helpful, and they did what they could to help. There were just these moments where you're like, oh, yeah, I remember now. We've crashed into this election after a lightning-fast leadership review, and everything

Corey 29:21

everything is just kind of a little bit frenetic. In

Zain 29:23

In some ways, Carter, didn't it feel like, and I say didn't it because there's conversations that I've had with you, despite, like, the fact that I was not involved as intimately as Carter. There are conversations I've had with both of you along the way, Corey, around what's been going on and how. But, Cart, didn't it some way feel like a mayoral where you were kind of—Corey was his own thing. Yeah, he had to use red, and yeah, he had to use liberal assets, but you guys were doing things that other campaigns did not to kind of speak to your incongruity. And

Zain 29:51

that where, like, both of you kind of thrive? Confederation is worth fighting for is one example. You know, I'll mention another. other, I think you guys may have been the only campaign in Calgary that was running against Danielle Smith in some way with her being on leaflets. I'm not sure who else did that. And of course, you had a unique opportunity here with Nixon as being your candidate. But Carter, did it kind of feel like because it was so short, and it was not centrally coordinated, and they didn't have months to plan it, that you were kind of just running a Merrill in a writing?

Carter 30:18

Yeah, I mean, I would suggest that we were running the

Carter 30:23

the right campaign, right? Like, Like, I think that Corey, being kind of a mature candidate, wasn't worried about, oh, should we do contrast? You know, he understood right off the bat that we needed to do contrast. And the contrast wasn't going to be, you

Carter 30:38

you know, Jeremy Nixon versus Corey Hogan. It needed to have more oomph to it. We were reminded by our good friend Dan Arnold that Corey Hogan's name recognition in the riding was going to be about 20%. and uh pierre probably or pierre uh mark carney's gonna be 100 yeah

Carter 30:57

so we put mark carney in the window we put danielle smith in the window we put those two battling and there was some pushback on on on that contrast but that contrast i still maintain was one of the one of the reasons that we were so successful in this actual campaign well

Corey 31:15

well sure and actually why don't i zoom back a a little bit to the friday of the so i mentioned that like there was a moment where like hey if you'd given me a time machine i would have you would have taken

Corey 31:24

like day two or three yeah yeah and so but you can't and so what i did at that time is i sat down and and i am a strategist and so i thought well what are the things that i think need to happen right now and i i put out a list of like four bullets of like these are the activities that i believe need to occur in order for us to like run this campaign and none of them are earth shattering but earth shattering is not the point right earth shattering is not the point the point is to make sure you've got a clear strategy a simple strategy that everybody can do and i just pulled it up here on my computer and so number one strategy one was project a two-way race we needed people to know it was between myself and the conservative candidate so that meant we we had big groups going out instead of scattering into smaller groups we prioritized getting signs up we focused on major arteries and sign locations we took any broadcast media opportunity we could we highlighted vote projections and we tried to create a buzz we tried to get people to think okay this is a really serious really exciting campaign the

Corey 32:21

the second one and this ties into carter's last point was take the fight to nixon you know uh he is outside of the conservative mainstream it personally individually might be very nice fellow but he ran for danielle smith twice he is certainly more right wing than len weber who was the candidate and the mp that he was looking to replace and he And he works for the UCP caucus right now. And so it was really about making sure people understood that contrast. And to Stephen's point, in many ways, it was less about me and Jeremy. It was more about our two bosses, right? It was about Mark

Corey 32:53

Mark Carney and it was about Danielle Smith. But there is this US style politics that Smith has brought in and there's this ambivalence to Canada and we wanted to make sure that it was highlighted. That goes to kind of the slogan, right? right? And number three here, and this is kind of it, there's only three and then there's a broader comment, was it's all about Carney and Canada. So, when you say, yo, you were running a mayoral style campaign, I

Corey 33:18

I agree and I don't. I agree in the sense that from an organization, we were really free to do what we want. Actually, to a degree, I haven't seen in the Liberal Party in decades, right? Right,

Zain 33:26

latitude that was really command and control. Yeah, it was really

Zain 33:29

wild. Governing party of Canada, you probably would not see. That's right.

Corey 33:32

right. As someone who's actually

Zain 33:32

actually who's actually someone who's like implemented that for other candidates as being most certainly

Corey 33:37

certainly like i am

Corey 33:38

not like we had a totally free hand yeah

Corey 33:41

but it was all about carney we put mark carney wherever we could put him right it and we really wanted to emphasize it's not about the past 10 years it's about the next 10 years it's about strong serious leadership and it's about our country so so those were the governing like the three principles that i left everybody on on kind of the campaign leadership and then in

Corey 34:00

in all of that was we have no time so we need to scale everything's got to be about scale it's not about the two conversations it's about the 200 conversations prioritize broadcast prioritize multipliers so get as many volunteers out as you can for example eliminate

Corey 34:13

eliminate blocks let people do their things don't be the person they're waiting to hear from like just empower people and so that was the strategy you know and that's how we pulled through carter

Zain 34:23

carter jump in i've got a more specific question for you in a second here

Carter 34:25

well i mean the The totally free hand is an interesting observation. We didn't ask.

Carter 34:33

We came in on April Fool's Day, and we didn't get anybody to sign off on our signs. We had no sign off on our brochures. We didn't go to the

Carter 34:44

the powers that be in the party and say, you

Carter 34:47

you know, Tyler, what do you think of this? Or Morgan, what do you think of this? we did it showed

Carter 34:51

showed them afterwards when it was like when 56 000 copies of something went out then they went oh that's

Carter 34:58

that's already gone yeah do

Zain 35:01

you think everyone do you think everyone did it the same way carter no i

Carter 35:04

i don't i don't think that everybody that's

Zain 35:05

that's a steven carter special

Corey 35:07

special though that's like where you operate well look it wasn't just steven like steven will get his share of the glory but we had we had a whole team of people writing things developing things, designing things. And we empowered people. We just said, we don't have time to run things up the chain. Just do it. Just do it. Use your brain. Be smart about it. Just do it.

Zain 35:27

Corey, speaking of, I'm going to ask you this question then, rather than Carter, because I think it's a good point to kind of give credit across the board to those who built the campaign sort of thing, even if Stephen, you and Heather laid down the tracks.

Zain 35:41

Corey, was this a campaign, I'm going to ask the question this way, and maybe you can pick up on my intent. Was this a campaign that was meant to last four weeks? Or do you feel like if you guys had added weeks added to it, it would have only gotten stronger and stronger? And I guess the reason I'm asking that is like the difference between building a campaign for short term versus slightly more midterm purposes. I'm curious your observation. Well,

Corey 36:00

Well, we would have built it different. I think we were, and you know this, right? We had these big days where we tried to get as many volunteers out as possible. By the red zone.

Corey 36:08

And before that, pink and fed red. And they were really successful. Like we had the most doors knocked of any liberal campaign. And then we said, let's do more, right? So we had two days where we really smashed some records where we're, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of doors, hundreds of volunteers, and we just got out there. And you can't do that if you're running for two years, right? In many ways, we use the shot of adrenaline you get from being a week late to justify the sprint. And I think it was really successful. successful if you had the same number of volunteers over a different period of time you would have paced yourself different or you should pace yourself differently i believe and um and it would have just been different that's all yeah

Zain 36:48

yeah carter what were your observation on that on on building something for four weeks versus campaigns you've built in the past that often last sometimes years well

Carter 36:56

well i think that in longer campaigns you're trying to to uh buy

Carter 36:59

buy everybody in like get everybody's buy-in all the way through and you're you're trying to include them and kind of move move them up into into more and more responsible positions right so you get a door knocker who starts off as a door knocker they move up to a captain they move up to a logistics coordinator the

Corey 37:17

the number of battlefield promotions we had was like see we we just really it was

Corey 37:21

you door knocked once you're a captain

Carter 37:23

captain congratulations and did that happen

Corey 37:25

happen across the the the org like it happened for us but like no no i mean your org your org like oh yeah oh yeah zane like it was we it was crazy like and this came from having so many volunteers like the scale like right you door knocked once before you know how minivan which is the liberal app to track these things works congratulations you're a captain and we you know and i did get some flack from some volunteers and actually i think fair flack where they'd be like oh your captains don't seem very like organized or coordinated sometimes and i said well yeah but like got the job 18

Corey 37:55

ago they cut the job 18 seconds ago and they're doing a pretty good job given that you know and they were were wonderful like did so every one of our volunteers was so good carter

Zain 38:02

carter we talked about volunteers on your accountability episode yeah give me a sense of what this um campaign

Zain 38:11

campaign has taught you about volunteers either about volume scale ambition uh the work uh we talked about the podcast influence i'm kind of curious if this has taught you something new something something interesting, has underlined a lesson as it relates to volunteership. Because the people-powered aspect of this, I think, is really impressive. Like, really, really impressive. And I think it was perhaps not unique to your campaign, Corey, but you were one of the few campaigns that was blessed with it so quickly, especially given week late and then three days of people not thinking it was real, or at least a portion.

Carter 38:44

Well, I think that me doing a volunteerism-isn't-real-anymore kind of thing two weeks before you launch... You kind of did that, didn't you? Yeah, and then all of a sudden, everybody's coming out and saying, I actually am going to volunteer. You know, what did I learn? I learned that there still is a volunteer culture. The people will volunteer if they are presented with the right opportunities. And by opportunities, I don't mean like, oh, I prefer to do policy instead of door knocking.

Zain 39:15

Which, by the way, our strategy over door, which is always a trouble we've had.

Zain 39:18

Everybody wants. Like the three of us, yeah. Oh,

Carter 39:19

Oh, yeah, everybody wants to be the strategist. Which

Zain 39:20

Which is why I didn't participate. I was like, Corey, it's taken. Oh, okay. Well, then I'm not showing up, Corey. Exactly. That's fine. The slot's taken. Well, that's good. But Carter, what do you mean around people want to show up and have that ambition? Well,

Carter 39:34

Well, I mean, we had so many people who wanted to do the door knocking. They wanted to do the campaign. They didn't want to do, like, they just wanted to meet Corey. They just wanted to, you know, if door knocking was the way to meet Corey, then they were happy to do that. That's so fascinating. yeah i mean when cory came in and this is the last i think it was the saturday cory before yeah i know what

Corey 39:55

what you're talking about where it was almost like a receiving line yeah

Carter 39:58

every all the volunteers are ring are showing up and cory's like thank you for coming to my funeral um this is that's that's not what i was going is this the

Zain 40:06

the evening we did the thing together no this was

Corey 40:08

two weeks after just

Carter 40:11

yeah the saturday morning of so the paint the town red kind kind of or not the paint that was the flood the red zone it was the flood the red zone and it was it was massive um and cory just stood there for

Carter 40:24

at least a half an hour maybe you know maybe even longer shaking every just shaking hands and thanking people for showing up and taking pictures and people

Carter 40:33

people were just delighted to be doing it so my relationship with volunteerism has has significantly shifted in the during the course of this campaign this campaign is kind

Zain 40:42

kind of giving you like like a shot in the arm and a dose of hope in that sense oh

Carter 40:46

oh yeah for sure for

Zain 40:47

for anything carter you court once again anything carter you would take from this campaign and do differently on your next one i

Carter 40:52

i think that uh yeah

Carter 40:55

yeah i mean trying to make it so that everybody feels like they've got access to

Carter 41:01

the candidate or to me or to the

Carter 41:05

the campaign leadership is

Zain 41:06

is that usually not the case i

Carter 41:07

think that you sometimes

Carter 41:08

sometimes feel like you're shut off right

Carter 41:11

right uh that the campaign has uh a closed door to the people who are actually doing stuff yeah

Zain 41:18

corner office style even if how the office is set up and stuff cory what what did you kind of learn with um this broader sort of volunteerism that yet that your campaign kind of unlocked

Corey 41:28

unlocked or unearthed also like volunteers are multipliers right i always think about this in terms of of canvas and we'll get there i'm sure but like we and we had this chat we had this chat during the election right like let's say i go door knocking for two door knocking shifts and they're great door yeah

Corey 41:44

and and you talk to let's say just for easy math a hundred people sure sure and i think that's a pretty realistic number over like a day um maybe

Corey 41:58

10 of them you're having a conversation that is in any way shape or form persuasive like you might actually be able to change their vote because a lot of them are like like, ah, I voted for you, bing, and they were going to vote for you either way, or no, I'm not voting for you, bong, you know, and you're not getting that vote, right? But like the actual meaningful conversations you can have. And let's be clear, like as the candidate, I have more of an opportunity to do that because I'm not speaking on behalf of the candidate. I am the candidate, right? Yeah.

Corey 42:22

So let's say it's 10.

Corey 42:24

There are 35 days in a regular campaign. That means you're having 350 conversations of that level of meaningfulness as the candidate being out there every day but i think this goes to steven's point if you're out there every day and all of the volunteers come out with you every day and you have hundreds of volunteers all of a sudden you are having thousands of conversations and so i mean like volunteers are a multiplier and they make the campaign work they do a campaign does not work without volunteers because the candidate cannot possibly talk to 90 some thousand electors themselves in a campaign you know and they're not going to have uh the the conversations that they need to have at scale so again it all goes back back to that point about it's scale and you

Corey 43:04

you get those volunteers going out there when you're out there and you're talking to people and you're moving through there as well and so i just i can't say enough good things about the volunteer side of this organization we had tara and we had sangeeta we had bobby pitching it at a certain point because tara had to step away for a few days they were like amazing coordinators but amazing volunteers like they just really showed up and we had this problem on the campaign quote-unquote problem and

Corey 43:32

and somewhat tied to like the battlefield promotion thing every campaign i've ever worked on i think if

Corey 43:37

if you have like a door knocking shift and say a dozen people are signed up for it yeah

Corey 43:41

yeah nine are going to show up right this is the only campaign i've ever worked on where consistently more people would show up for the door knocking shift then we're signed up to show up for it so we ended up very quickly having to get to a place where we had to why why

Zain 43:55

why why i'm sorry if i'm being so like pestering i just want to see if there's lessons that others can adopt here why do you think that was well

Corey 44:02

well i do think that there was a little enthusiasm there was some momentum we tried to go big we tried to create a bit of a show and um and uh we also always tried to have fun you know there's that that paul wells rule like the person who's having the most fun is winning i think by that rule we there wasn't a day we lost like this was a campaign with a lot of lightness too like it It was a pretty fun campaign.

Zain 44:24

I want to pick up on this, because I think this is really interesting to me. Carter, talk to me about the fun aspect in two ways. Aspect number one is the Corey way. Like, the campaign has to have fun. But I also think there's something that I think extends from the podcast and the personality, and I'd say authentic personality, that Corey is. Which is, obviously, I think everyone who listens to the show more than likely comes to the same conclusion, which is Corey's probably the brightest one on the show. Sorry, Carter. But secondly, Corey also doesn't take himself all that seriously. He joins us in the mud in that regard. I think there's something to that. Am I right or wrong there in that sense? In the sense that, you know, as funny, as able to get down, as authentic, you know, and despite like having these ambitions, which have led him to this seat and hopefully more, that there's like an element of personality and fun that compounds a campaign that has that fun. And maybe the heart of the question is, does your candidate need to be a fun person in

Zain 45:20

order to have a fun campaign? And that might sound like a really simple question, but I often have never thought about it that way. And I think one of the reasons, if I kind of go on a bit of a diatribe, one of the reasons the Nenshi campaigns, I think, have been so successful is that Nahid is its own version of witty and fun and sarcastic and biting. And not all these terms apply to you, Corey, but I'm just kind of describing. And that's led to fun-ish campaigns. So, Carter, having experienced, I guess, both of the examples I'm putting on the table, but just as examples, does your candidate need to be a fun, interesting, authentic, maybe take out authentic, because we've talked about too many, but do they need to be a fun person in order to have a fun campaign?

Carter 45:58

I think it certainly helps. I think that the ice-cold candidate who

Carter 46:03

is a little bit aloof and a little bit removed doesn't get to have as much fun. um you know i think that the the really fun campaigns are the ones where the candidate's gonna laugh at your jokes right

Carter 46:16

and if we've learned nothing else on this podcast it is your choice an

Zain 46:21

an easy audience in a long time you

Carter 46:22

you know he's he's laughed at all my jokes for for 10 years that's true actually

Zain 46:29

carter do the joke

Zain 46:33

there there's nothing there there's not even a joke and he's laughing fucking laughing at air uh carter

Zain 46:37

carter does your candidate need to be an easy laugh in order for your campaign to have fun it

Carter 46:42

it certainly helps okay

Zain 46:43

okay there you go i appreciate that yeah um

Zain 46:45

um take me to a couple of things um what

Zain 46:49

what if both of you appreciated and cory i'll stick with you on this because i i i i'm curious as a candidate and as a person who initially raised this point who wanted to take a potential exit ramp on day two what have you appreciated about what you could do in four weeks that that when you're conventional first-time candidate but long-time strategist wisdom you may not have appreciated without this lived experience that you just went through oh

Corey 47:10

oh you know it's funny so i um i

Corey 47:13

i i work at a university before that i worked for the government i was in the private sector before that and campaigns

Corey 47:19

campaigns are much faster than any of those things right just

Corey 47:22

much much faster and i think that it was a great learning that i think there's just good life advice like like, just do it. Just, you know, just start, just go. It's so crazy what you can accomplish in four weeks when you need to accomplish it in four weeks. And there's that old cliche about there's weeks that feel like years and years that feel like weeks, right? And this definitely was weeks that felt like years. Like, it's hard to even remember my life before April 1st in some funny ways. But yeah, it's

Corey 47:55

it's kind of the corollary to the point we're making about the liberal leadership race like there's so many things in life whether it be meetings or campaigns clearly where it's like air in a balloon it will take more and more and more but it doesn't necessarily improve the outcomes for you so just just go for it i i really do believe that and i think it was um it was such an incredible reminder that i cannot believe what the team built in four weeks it's totally nuts to me carter

Zain 48:21

carter what do you think your thoughts here well

Carter 48:26

think that the structure and the organization that came together so quickly, like as much as we're talking about all the volunteers and how great all the volunteers are, there was a core team that was there, I think, by April the 3rd.

Carter 48:40

Yeah, for sure. And that core team, you know, Corey's mentioned a couple already with Tara and Sangeeta and Heather, but Kara Levis, who...

Corey 48:49

who... We were going to get there, I assume, but like just... Just unreal. absolute legend on get out the vote quinton with canvas you know videos that ryan put together for us communication

Carter 48:58

communication skills yeah who we'd worked with at h and k yeah uh

Carter 49:02

uh all back former colleague of

Carter 49:05

yeah and this one coming through and helping us with all of the space and making sure that we could kind of just even have a headquarters uh you know and esmahan writing everything like there was there was a tremendous amount of work that occurred um from a group of volunteer from From a very small group of volunteers at the, I

Carter 49:26

don't want to say higher levels. I want to say at the beginning, because

Carter 49:29

because it really was about getting them in and getting them organized. That group being organized and ready to go by April 2nd, April 3rd, gave

Carter 49:39

gave us April 7th.

Corey 49:41

7th. You haven't even mentioned Harris, who was

Corey 49:43

And he was the CFO before. And in fact, he was the CFO when Confederation was founded back in like 2013. When you

Carter 49:49

you were the initial president. When

Corey 49:50

When I was the first president of Calgary Confederation Liberals. Yeah. And I'm

Corey 49:55

I'm sure I'm now very worried that we've probably forgotten like somebody blindly obvious, but- Myself.

Zain 50:00

Myself. That would be myself. Just to make sure. No, we're good

Zain 50:04

We're good there. Just want to make sure I'm waiting.

Corey 50:06

mean, it was amazing, man. It was like, it was really something. And the volunteers fed into this. Everything flowed so nicely. Like the volunteers fed into Quentin's canvas strategy and Sangeeta's phoning strategy. And, and of course, the GOTV and there's virtuous cycles we created where they'd show up to one event, and then they would come to another. It was just amazing. Oh, and signs. Jeez, that's another thing we need

Zain 50:27

need to talk about. Let's talk about that. Crazy

Zain 50:28

good sign, Chris. Which X factor do you think gave you the biggest lift on this campaign? Because we haven't even talked, Corey, about the results, but you'll probably, and both of you will know them, but this is a massive flip. This writing has not gone red since the 1940s or whatever.

Zain 50:44

This area. I think that's exactly right. Since the 1940s. You were the only liberal in the entire city. um the the the incumbent unfortunately george shahal did not did not get his seat um and

Zain 50:56

and the last election cory this was a plus 15 conservative win maybe more yeah like something i think that that i i don't think i'm off if i say something like that yeah and you turn that in in four weeks as a unit and as a national movement that the carney you know machine was driving um

Zain 51:15

what do you think was the x factor that gave you local lift does that make sense because i I, like you, think it's appropriate to credit what Carney and the Libs were doing at the top, but what's the local lift that allowed what I just mentioned from a few metrics perspective to happen? And I think your candidacy is unique in particular. Let's skip that for a second because we've talked about

Corey 51:34

about it. What else? Yeah, it's not me. I mean, I'm glad I got to be the vehicle for it. To me, it's the team. It's exactly the people that Stephen was just mentioning. I have never on a local campaign, like this could have been the team that ran a national campaign. And I'm not kidding. Like, this was like an incredibly good, incredibly polished, incredibly experienced team. And, you know, we already talked about the support we were getting from Morgan and Tyler in particular as well. Like, they just, everything was just clicking. I've never, never worked on a campaign that

Corey 52:05

that is just one writing that had such an abundance of professionals on it. It was crazy. Well,

Zain 52:11

let's talk about this then, because Carter, you and I have talked, and actually, Corey, I think you've been part of this episode, too, in the past, talking about, can your team have too many A players?

Corey 52:21

Remember, we've talked about

Zain 52:21

about this. This has been,

Zain 52:23

guys have just lived

Corey 52:24

lived through this. and so

Zain 52:25

so i would have thought

Corey 52:25

thought yes if you had asked me my

Zain 52:28

would i be honest with you on this what's one of the reasons i was not as intimately involved i'm like cory you have all the help you need you've got all these amazing people but

Zain 52:36

but you would have thought yes i don't want to interrupt you but i just want to interject like a real word sort of example um which is like

Zain 52:45

getting both of you to have now having lived this campaign stress test the theory can you have too too many star players can you build the lakers with shaq kobe malone and gary payton um and and still have a successful outcome because i do want to test that with you yeah

Corey 53:02

yeah i mean i guess the answer is i again the time probably helped right like we all just had to get down to it because the time also then drove the the management philosophy of like you're empowered to just do it so we didn't have right we didn't have campaign meetings zane like we didn't sit there like once well we every morning we did like almost like a huddle like a stand-up yeah like a huddle but But you

Zain 53:21

you weren't like being like, what's our strategy for today? It wasn't yet. It wasn't

Corey 53:25

wasn't that. And so we didn't sit there and then argue about what we were going to do. It was like, well, it's finance. Harris, what are we doing there? Okay. Oh, it's GOTV. Kara, what are we doing there? You know? And it just worked because people

Zain 53:38

people were empowered. It's just like everyone was like a senior person at Brookfield and they just knew exactly what to do, Carter. Is that a fair analogy? It's

Zain 53:44

It's the exact analogy. Yeah. Yeah.

Carter 53:46

Yeah. It's the exact

Zain 53:47

But to the point, what did this teach you about eight players on teams and anything you would change and further implement? Or was this part of the Stephen Carter philosophy to collect all the talent you can and make it work? I'm kind of curious around what you think about talent. You

Corey 54:02

You know, so like, I think in general, very talented people, if you don't give them enough to do get bored about what was amazing about this campaign is just the scale of volunteers and the scale of the effort meant nobody was bored. Like nobody's sitting there being like, I want to do that. Why am I not in charge of that? We're all drowning in our own separate streams of work. So, so I don't know if there's a clean answer to that Zane, but I think part of why it worked with so many people at such like experienced and seasoned levels is because like,

Corey 54:30

like, like nobody was fighting over work. We were just trying to get things done. Well,

Carter 54:33

Well, and that's where I wanted to go. I mean, there's at least five campaign manager quality people on this campaign, at least five.

Carter 54:40

And those campaign managers- Many of them have done

Zain 54:42

done the job successfully before in

Zain 54:44

past as well. But

Carter 54:45

But they all took the role that was given to them. And that role turned into something- Or that needed to

Zain 54:49

to be accomplished. Yeah. Yeah.

Carter 54:50

Yeah. And it turned out to be something bigger too, right? Like we didn't just run a GOTV. We ran the best GOTV I've ever seen.

Carter 54:58

We didn't just run, you know, field. we got to 42 000 out of 52 000 houses in a four-week period um i mean

Carter 55:09

they come on no one thought we were going to be able to do that um but because we were doing that we were stretching quinton we were stretching tara to make sure that we could get the volunteers you know sangita was working the phones every day not calling not calling anybody but volunteers volunteers cory was working the phones all day calling the volunteers just

Corey 55:29

just calling volunteers everybody

Carter 55:30

everybody had these what

Zain 55:31

cory doing were you thanking them were you asking him to do roles i mean i was i was i was

Corey 55:35

was for sure thanking people who had given so much of their time but i was also calling new volunteers and saying i see you signed up can can i sign you like in a general sense can i sign you up for a shift how was that that's

Corey 55:46

was you know it was i so actually i've got to say shannon phillips my friend the former energy or environment minister here in in alberta she's the one who really recommended that to me she said great use of candidate time it's harder for people to say no to the candidate as a volunteer but also it's it's a multiplier go back to the whole concept about scale so the way i started thinking about it at a certain point zane especially when i was calling those new volunteer lists is if um it you know so this takes me off the doors for three hours let's say right i miss a door knocking shift if i sign up three volunteers let's assume i'm three times as effective just by merit of being candidate not not because I'm smarter or anything like that. Yeah, because your name is on the

Zain 56:24

the signs. That's right.

Corey 56:24

My name's on the signs. So if I sign up three volunteers over the next three hours, it's a push. I've got more people that are out there. It's a strategic win. Yeah, it's a strategic win. We're getting more conversations. Everyone after that is gravy. And if they show up more than once, it's gravy. So I kind of set my own almost like Salesforce. Lifetime customer value

Zain 56:44

value sort of equipment.

Corey 56:44

equipment. Of course. Yeah, yeah. And, but I truly believe that the multiplier effect of that was significant, because a volunteer might give you the next 12 hours, right? And that's incredible. So, I think it was an important part.

Zain 57:03

Air war in a local campaign, Corey. Yeah. Videos, digital, lit. Talk to me about its importance, how it worked, how it didn't work. we often talk about these campaigns being exclusively ground game you're someone with a bit of profile um so maybe not necessarily for you how did you guys approach it how did you approach it as a candidate uh

Corey 57:25

uh okay well so the air war especially at the start we just wanted to make sure that we were like a big serious campaign and just present people to narrow down to like those two options here right that was our main focus and part of that was really showing polish and professionalism and that's where ryan and his videos was like sure holy cow like if you google me and you find our socials these these things looked beautiful they looked like they came out of central campaign right uh and they were done by a volunteer on on this local campaign uh similarly the literature allowed us to get out there in a big way in volume like it really was like we just wanted to make sure there was no missing that we were the the show no matter how how you decided to engage with people the videos i was very taken with i thought ryan had a really great and let me just give a special

Zain 58:11

special shout out to ryan as well because he's also you know you mentioned that he's a guy who or the quality was out of like central campaign it's because he's done central campaign work right he's a guy who's done that's that type of quality work cadence

Zain 58:24

of all of it right so he's

Corey 58:25

well and so he created this concept like of these explainer videos which you know Q&A yeah which I really I really liked and and we didn't script those by the way like we just I just talked like and we would usually do two takes and he would cut a couple of things into them and then we would uh he'd be like oh you said this and do you have data on that and I would send him a chart or whatnot and I thought it was a really cool partnership but beyond that it just it made it all feel like very substantive if that's what you were looking for and the number of times on the doors I would end up with a conversation about the videos or the literature and it just created a bit of a virtuous cycle interesting but what i really do want to make sure i don't fail

Corey 59:05

fail to say is uh

Corey 59:09

interesting thing about doors for me is i i have really evolved my theory because we've talked about does door knocking even matter yes

Zain 59:16

yes i think critically by the way like like as in concluding it doesn't yeah i i forget who was on which team well

Corey 59:22

well i've i've changed my view a little bit on that i think that door knocking as we've done it for the past five years maybe doesn't but i actually think there's a different way to do it which is well

Corey 59:33

well here's what i want to say about door knocking in 2025 all

Corey 59:37

all of the political parties are so algorithm driven right they say i'll use the liberal ones like they'll rank one two three four or five right like the ones are the people we think are almost certainly liberals to the next level out so can

Zain 59:48

can i just interrupt you there

Corey 59:50

there for a second

Corey 59:50

i mean you're gonna anyway so for clarity Well,

Zain 59:52

Well, this is maybe one of the last times you're going to

Zain 59:54

me interrupt you, other than maybe in the House of Commons one day when I run for the conservatives on the other side. What

Zain 1:00:01

twist. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you could be my shadow minister one day. Oh, okay. That'd be nice.

Zain 1:00:08

When you say parties are algorithmic, I think people need to understand this. Those ratings that you just gave those doors, are those provided to you by the party? Yeah. Okay, yeah. So I think you can explain that a bit. I don't know if people fully understand that the party provides you an algorithmic rating of what type of, what quality of door you're at versus what

Zain 1:00:29

people have heard, which is that campaigns are the ones doing that work. Well,

Corey 1:00:33

Well, so it's based on the information that the party has, whether it's the results of the polls last time, maybe you took a sign two elections ago, maybe you've donated before, we've ID'd you in a previous election. And from that, they say, these people are good. These people probably not. Don't waste your time on the probably not. The name of the game is get IDs. Let's roll. And so all the parties do this, like to some degree, all of the parties do this, right? Right.

Corey 1:01:01

one of the things that was clear, and I think in part, because we did have a swing from the previous election, right.

Corey 1:01:06

That, that obsession with that data has led political parties to a place of, of making their canvas much, have much less purpose, you know, and it's much less persuasive. And so I've become pretty convinced and I shouldn't overlearn lessons from one campaign here, but I'll just, I'll tell you, we

Corey 1:01:23

we had, you know, at a certain point in the the campaign we get the direction or the request i suppose a better way to put it because we didn't do it in the final summation of okay now it's time to just talk to your ones and twos like just forget about everybody else let's just move on like yeah persuasion's done that's about get out the vote and we did this for like a day and on that day uh you're skipping over so many houses that you can tell are our people they've got like defend alberta park signs out front or you know they've got a pride flag in the window or something like

Zain 1:01:50

like no uh no provincial pension plan or whatever whatever

Corey 1:01:54

and you you can tell that they're going to be our people if we can get to them but we're just walking by them and we're also going many many steps or we're even getting in cars between doors oh really we're burning a lot of time and so uh i go back and talking to quentin we're talking about the problem and i'm like i don't know man it doesn't feel right and he's like yeah i know it doesn't feel quite right so we ran this experiment where we said forget it we're just we're gonna do i can't remember quentin had a great phrase for it but i forget what it was But basically, it's like, unless they've already voted, because we're now in advanced poll weekend, right? Or unless they have already been canvassed, we're going to hit the door still. And we found so many supporters in the threes, in the fours, in the fives. And that was just because we had a great wave campaign, Mark Carney, right? All of that stuff going on. but it made me think about it more broadly if

Corey 1:02:45

if you are there's a problem in politics in that universe is narrow you see this with mps right they come in they've got a team that team slowly shrinks over time we talked about that with justin trudeau right that's

Zain 1:02:56

that's kind of true i

Corey 1:02:59

organizations too and and the algorithm i think is getting us to be like so laser focused on the people already there we are losing so many good opportunities to expand the base and so when i i say i don't think the door knocking matters i think what i'm going to say is i don't think that this algorithm driven door knocking is doing us any favors i think this is how political parties die and so get out there spend the time don't be senseless don't go to like 30 doors in a row that are not not there for you but there are ways to do it in various communities uh where i think you can get way more vote you can have meaningful conversations with with people that maybe you thought were decided and they're not and um i i for me like you the last point i'll say on this is so i was talking to esmahan razavi about this she's uh she's an organizer for the ndp she ran two very improbable victories uh simultaneously

Corey 1:03:53

simultaneously in calgary acadia and calgary glenmore both coming down to just a handful of votes yes

Corey 1:03:59

and so while i'm having these conversations with quentin as well about i don't know these don't feel right i don't like this i you know it was feeling a lot better when we're just hitting every door right i

Corey 1:04:08

say to her well what do you think what if we give this a shot you know this theory that

Corey 1:04:12

guys theory not even just for the candidate but for everybody yeah

Corey 1:04:15

yeah and she said oh i did the exact same thing i just like i felt like i was leaving too much meat on the bone so i just i gave up the the numbers the scoring the ndp have a different scoring system but i just went to every door again essentially doing exactly what what quinton had come to the conclusion of as well she had come come to the conclusion of and i can't help but note the two very improbable winning campaigns both came to the conclusion algorithms aren't working for us yeah and and carter and i had some chat but i've about why that might be the case particularly in canada but i'm going to stop there because i've been pick

Zain 1:04:46

pick it up pick it up carter and then also uh take me home on geo tv and why it was so interesting and impressive and then what lessons would you replicate or pass on to others so pick up where cory left off and then let's head into geo tv right after sure

Carter 1:04:58

sure i mean i I think that the thing with algorithmic decision-making is it requires data. And the data that we have in Canada is just too thin. You know, we have an election every four years. The provincial parties aren't really feeding information into the federal parties. There's no municipal campaigns that are feeding information in. So you're getting door knocked once every four years. And from that information, people are trying to draw conclusions. And there's no

Corey 1:05:25

no data brokers too, right? Yeah.

Carter 1:05:26

So you're not able to buy the cable company's data. You're not able to buy, you know, there's so much data that's available in the United States. It's just simply not available here.

Carter 1:05:38

You know, so you're not able to kind of export that expertise that Facebook has and put them on to every single household in Canada. And yet we try to. And that decision that's made. Yeah, we try

Carter 1:05:51

Yeah. You know, one, two, three, four, five. I mean, Corey undersells it. fives were outperforming threes fives were almost outperforming twos right like the

Zain 1:06:00

the the that's a great that's that's that's wild that's a great insight but it's also fucking wild yeah

Zain 1:06:07

well like and i and and and it's the thing is if if this was that was like a sharp criticism of the liberal party i might take it with a grain of salt it's not though it's a criticism of how we collectively do the activity yeah

Carter 1:06:19

everybody needs to relearn the lesson of voter identification which then Then leads us to the GOTV. Do you want me to just to jump under the GOTV? Corey, would you,

Zain 1:06:29

you, in a second, but maybe, can I spend a second on this? Sure. Which is, if

Zain 1:06:33

if you were like

Zain 1:06:35

like the czar of door knocking or canvas, would you hide these scores from campaigns going forward and say, like, you know, and by the way, we've got this extra pile of ones in your final weekend that you should also mobilize? And maybe that's not the right approach, but I'm kind of curious, like, how would you action this if cory hogan and stephen carter were developing door knocking from the ground up again no

Corey 1:06:58

no i think um i i think actually carter was saying it right like we've got to relearn the lessons of door knocking and it's it's about it i mean we got to use data not to the point of senselessness like let's use data to understand where we can go and let's you know you don't want to create overly precise models that are then overly wrong it's just not how it's going to to work on a campaign like it should be something that points you in the right direction it shouldn't be driving the car and so some of how you do that zane is you've got to trust some of the people on the ground and some of the candidate intuition and local expertise i don't even mean candidate intuition that makes it sound because i'm a candidate i know better that's not what i mean but like yeah yeah yeah you've got to talk to the volunteers who'd be like well i don't know that street seems okay right like you've got to allow that that kind of flexibility i was having a a situation at some point and bobby who's one of our best door knockers he said this right he's like oh i've just been calling audibles you know i see that sign it's not on my list i'm gonna go knock it anyways i'm getting a sign location one out of every three times just because he'd get a vibe from the house and like the location and you see it

Zain 1:07:58

it often enough there's pattern recognition there's other things yeah absolutely and

Zain 1:08:03

you're like this street's good that like there's something to like the streakiness of a street for example there's a there there

Corey 1:08:09

right like in both ways it's like there's a social network that exists that's the point exactly so i you know i think that uh i think we do need to take a hard hard look at some of this algo driven stuff and say is it actually serving us and and maybe it was particularly bad in confederation because of a dearth of data from a couple of campaigns that just were not as big not to disparage those campaigns yeah

Corey 1:08:30

but i do think that it was a cautionary tale carter

Zain 1:08:34

carter i want you to take us home on geo tv well both of you but before i do that can i just ask you guys some rapid fire on did Did you or did you not do this? Sure. You

Carter 1:08:42

You can do anything. You're like the host right

Zain 1:08:47

Okay. Walk me through. Right? Like, super tight writing.

Corey 1:08:53

what are we going to do with it? How's

Zain 1:08:54

How's it going to change our behavior?

Zain 1:08:56

I'm not the one asking the question for my benefit. I'm doing it on behalf of the audience, so don't scold me, okay? There was nothing to change. Remember the time my member of parliament elect scolded me on a podcast, Carter? He was a bit rude.

Zain 1:09:08

thought the tone was not great i thought the tone was not great um why why didn't you do it

Carter 1:09:14

would have been a waste of money would have would have slowed us down we would have been waiting for the results to determine what needed to happen and quite frankly between cory's brain and my ability to act we had enough uh

Zain 1:09:26

uh phones a paid uh paid external phones anything like that uh volunteer on the phones talk to me about that as a process says where was it ordered in into the the the triage of door knocking and lit dropping and all the other and signs and etc it was

Carter 1:09:41

was the last 30 so we when we reached our last $30,000 not that we spent $30,000 on it but when we reached when we when we fundraised over the 95 that we knew we had to spend that that was the base of the campaign that's when we started to put uh calling in live

Corey 1:10:00

yeah the door-to-door canvas was certainly the backbone of this campaign but we then did uh push further with phones as well the thing about door-to-door canvas and i think it's also one of the benefits of it that we haven't talked about is just the visibility and activating all of those volunteers and having them out in the community and having them tell their friends and neighbors like i'm going door knocking was also quite important that's

Zain 1:10:18

that's true the night that we did that that sort of q a for the or version of the show for the volunteers um i was getting texts all the time including seeing myself yeah group of 10 volunteers being like walking around the city or people texting being like Corey Hogan volunteers just came like what the hell man like that's crazy and there's like 10 of them like coming to a door they had not learned yet they were splintering sort of thing but it was interesting like there was a dimension of air war that the ground game

Corey 1:10:48

generated if that's fair and that was intentional like that was part of you go back to that Friday strategy like thing I was just talking about that was go out in big groups Corey

Zain 1:10:55

Corey any tactic you guys fought on you guys as in candidate versus campaign campaign

Corey 1:11:00

uh i don't think tactics well the ivr the ivr yeah yeah but like beside

Corey 1:11:05

like you wanted to do it or they wanted to do and you said no they said yes no uh no no i mean like the reality is steven and i have also worked together long enough like we've kind of converged on what we think are effective tactics which is that was

Zain 1:11:16

was a risk yeah

Corey 1:11:17

yeah absolutely for sure one

Zain 1:11:19

one that we were thinking about quite constantly no

Corey 1:11:21

no i didn't think about it too much i mean this really was a campaign that felt good most of the time in fact i can't think of a day that felt really bad you know there'd be times i'd go get my ass kicked in a community like the doors wouldn't be super super positive but there

Carter 1:11:35

there were also days you asked to have your ass kicked because you had such a good day before that

Corey 1:11:40

that is that is true so like this became almost like my leveling out right like you'd be in renfrew and you'd hand out 30 signs and you'd say okay well you better go send me to you

Corey 1:11:50

you know a briar hill i better go feel like that there is more of the community that's It's not necessarily a

Zain 1:11:56

Yeah. Carter, talk to me about GeoTV.

Carter 1:11:59

Well, GeoTV is the second

Carter 1:12:02

second half of identifying your vote. So once you've identified your vote, you have to make sure that they actually go to vote. And traditionally, what we do is we drop a postcard in people's mailboxes or something like that that says, your voting station is X, Y, or Z. And then people would go to that voting station and vote. and in a really complicated version of it you get um you've got uh you know bingo sheets or some sort of mechanism where you know exactly everybody who voted and that's what kara ran she ran a full data integrated sheet where every night the scrutineers would go in get photographs of the of the bingo sheets the right data would come back she all the data would be entered overnight and then we would have a new set of people to call and go door knock the next day and she didn't treat advanced polls as one advanced day of voting every day got that full treatment so that by the time that we got to running the election day we had tone you know treated

Zain 1:13:04

treated we had trained several gotv days in the can well

Corey 1:13:08

well we also had banked a lot of vote like Like, we should get to election day. But from process alone,

Zain 1:13:12

alone, from process alone, it was a well-lubricated machine.

Corey 1:13:15

Oh, most certainly. But

Zain 1:13:16

But from outcome, I think it's a fair point, obviously, that you, and I want to talk about the night of and the votes coming in, et cetera. We won about

Carter 1:13:23

about 3,500. We knew that we had about 3,500, 4,000 people who voted during advanced polls. We won advanced polls by a number just a little under that. So, you know, it was a monster when you look back on it. those advanced polls that those binger sheets at GOTV and then to run it again on the day of and have people doing knock and pulls so door knocking people and telling

Carter 1:13:48

telling them to get their asses to the polls because we know that they haven't voted I mean

Carter 1:13:51

mean that is a unbelievable feat and and Kara was running that all day long and updating it all the way through to our I think our last shift was 3 30 in the evening yeah or in the afternoon 3 30 or 5 30 in the afternoon no

Corey 1:14:04

no we it was pretty late like we were running right to the wire there okay

Zain 1:14:07

okay so talk to i want to finish off here um so let me set the stage you have this party and i'll set the stage of what i saw right when you have this party uh hundreds of people watching the cbc at a restaurant there's there's food there's drinks people are like eagerly refer everyone's on their phone not because they're anti-social but because that's the only way to get the writing level results right you know ryan's got a photo booth set up where where people are taking photos there's confed signs there's buttons etc um i'm there because of my massive contributions and to talk to the media uh about about uh your campaign on standby but you are not there carter's not there heather's not there the elements of the core team are not there talk to me about the parallel of what your night was uh and what you guys are doing how it felt honest reflections yeah what you were up to i'm really curious uh and then how the night went so

Corey 1:14:58

so um i'll just tell you the players were myself and my wife lori and And Stephen in one room, you know, kind of watching things and looking at results come in on Stephen's computer. Yeah,

Corey 1:15:08

across the street. And interpreting them. And then, yes, across the street. And then a couple of rooms down, this was at the hotel, were Heather and Kara, who were like getting the scrutiny reports in. The GOTV

Corey 1:15:20

GOTV work. And they're entering the data there and then showing up on Stephen's computer. I have to give Stephen some pretty insane props here. I really do. and it it's uh not something that comes naturally to me but he told me a couple days before the election he just texted me he's like i made a model and so i i immediately call of course and he's i'm like you got to tell me about the model what's going on here he said well based on my model i think you win by three percent and i said yeah he's steven he's terrible at predictions as far as

Corey 1:15:49

concerned right so that's

Zain 1:15:50

that's fine this is where we insert all the terrible predictions he's made if we have time yes jeb

Carter 1:15:56

jeb bush needs to survive this primary and compete in a general jeb bush is not surviving this

Carter 1:16:01

primary he's totally surviving this primary rock it down on your calendar okay steven carter so hold on jeb bush is the guy but

Corey 1:16:10

he's got he's gone poll by poll and given a score essentially from they're going to win by 20 points to we're going to win by 20 points in 10 point increments you know and just assigned to each of them and there are hundreds of polls of course now it wasn't 100 accurate but by poll by poll but in aggregate it was very good and so from my point of view as we're sitting there getting the scrutiny reports we are seeing areas come into varsity and they're they're doing better than we thought oh that's really cool oh and then here comes winston heights and that's a little worse than we thought but okay you know know we can live with that because then here's a bit

Corey 1:16:47

yeah yeah yeah and then exactly and so as we're coming through we're able to sort of assess where we are relative to expectation because the top line number tells you nothing like if all of the vote has come in from our best areas and we're winning by five we're actually pretty screwed but if all of the vote has come in from our worst areas and we're only down by five that's

Corey 1:17:06

that's that's workable right so because we had this sheet we were able to look through it and just identify where we were relative to our expectations and relative to our strength and i'm i'm telling you what was many hours but we you know we had it over time and every now and then we do a count like how many of our quote-unquote good polls are coming in versus the quote-unquote bad polls and uh we would kind of do a bit of a gut check well listen long story short here the polls that come in last are the advanced polls and we had a theory of the campaign that we were going to win those and yes we were actually doing fine we were tracking to carter's model pretty well like through the day of polls a little bit down but not like it not not enough to quote unquote well not enough to lose right we thought

Carter 1:17:47

thought okay we didn't we knew we weren't losing we're

Corey 1:17:49

we're like ah this looks okay but it's all hinged on us being right that on the premise favored us

Corey 1:17:55

right right so i was you know i was a little worried uh but people were texting me being like oh my god the roller coaster we were riding a different ride we were riding than us that's right that's right

Corey 1:18:05

right yeah so when when there's like people texting me on crazy highs because the polls have me up like really high we're not seeing that high so i'm like we'll see it's still early i wouldn't know you're giving like like bullet responses kind

Corey 1:18:17

kind of coming down meanwhile when it's getting the other way and it's flipping we're down a few votes we're like we're not too worried about it right now it's

Corey 1:18:23

it's okay like it's coming in as projected and

Corey 1:18:26

and then when the first couple of advanced polls came in and they were as expected and

Corey 1:18:31

and they were from a a couple of different areas and these are this

Zain 1:18:33

this is the coordination between karen heather to carter that's

Corey 1:18:35

that's right and then it that's when i started to be like okay i think we have this and then and more and more came in and you know i still wasn't 100 but carter was at this point i think pretty close to it being like no come on like we've got it we're good we're awesome uh and so we knew we knew to a level of confidence uh where we were standing well beyond what the average viewer who's just looking at the randomness or which polls have come in on elections canada right right

Corey 1:19:04

that also is a hallmark of a really strong campaign it's not even something that changes the outcome but because we had that sophisticated organization that cara had created and and because we had the model that steven had created we we were pretty good and there was one poll out two polls outstanding when i went down to talk to everybody i think right and

Corey 1:19:22

and we knew we'd won like we were still being like unless something weird happens but we knew we'd won and

Corey 1:19:27

and uh we just had to wait for them to come in and wait for the rest of the networks to call it because some of like uh the globe and mail called it and toronto star called it but the you know cbc hadn't called it they didn't call it till the final poll came in but the level of sophistication was again as as good as i've ever seen and it was very very exciting it was very cool and um yeah

Corey 1:19:48

yeah and and then we had a celebration at that banquet in university district which is also by the way where I saw Team Canada win the Four Nations Cup. So good energy there. And yeah,

Corey 1:19:59

yeah, I mean, Stephen, for all of the crap we give you on predictions, you predicted within like 1% the outcome of that election.

Carter 1:20:07

Yeah, it was a pretty, well, it was a little

Carter 1:20:11

little tighter than we wanted it to be, especially on the election day polls, but the advanced polls pulled us through.

Zain 1:20:18

Let me end on this final question. I'll get both of you to weigh in on, and then we'll call it a wrap here. um how

Zain 1:20:25

how do you keep this movement alive and

Zain 1:20:27

and maybe the maybe the premise is you don't like you it's a it's a very viable path to say this was purpose built for an outcome but in other ways i go back to the first question around the the convergence between the pod and the discord and the campaign and the and the and the in front of the doors and beside the doors uh and all the other things that have now been subsequently added in four weeks it started at this very different campaign between day one and day uh 35 right how

Zain 1:20:50

how do you how do you keep it alive do you keep it alive cory i'll let let you jump in first and then carter yeah

Corey 1:20:54

yeah i mean how do you turn a moment into a movement um

Corey 1:20:59

one in three calgarians voted for the liberal party i might have ended up being the only elected liberal mp right

Corey 1:21:04

but more people voted for the liberals in this province than they have as we said in

Corey 1:21:09

in literal generations so there is a moment here there's something to capture there's like some lightning that needs to be bottled and i think that the liberal party needs to do it i think that progressive calgarians need to do it whether you're capital p progressive living on the south side of the riding or you're progressive conservative living on the north side of the riding there is an opportunity here to chart a different course than we've been on and um there are going to be so many different distractions it's such an important time for the country that's kind of why i'm running or ran i guess now it's past tense um but we can't lose focus on the fact that there is a chance for a changing category to project itself differently so i don't really know the answer with clarity at this moment but i know we need to turn that moment into a movement and so

Corey 1:21:55

that'll be a part of my job i think over the next few years carter

Corey 1:21:58

carter one person who has no

Zain 1:21:59

no shortage of clarity steven carter well

Carter 1:22:02

well i mean this is uh similar to what

Carter 1:22:04

i did at the beginning of my career when i was working for joe clark and he was an mp for calgary center um you have to win the second election you know it's one thing to win the first election there's a lot of people have won the first election winning the second election is super hard. And the first thing is you need to make sure that you are seen as a member of the group, right? Corey has to be seen to be part of Calgary Confederation, and part of Calgary in general, because he can't just be the Confederation MP, he's got to be the Calgary MP. And the second thing that he needs to do is build an organization that can sustain that, whether that's the staffing in his office, the staffing in Ottawa, the staffing, or the volunteer structure that needs to come to play uh it will be a significant operation um from the beginning of of the term uh you know we it's kind of been fun we've all taken a break um and i don't mean a break break because i know that cory's been working really hard on making writing notes and doing all the things that need to be done but it's been a break but in about a

Carter 1:23:07

the next phase begins and And that next

Carter 1:23:10

next phase is going to be measured in organizational structure, how many people are involved, and frankly, how much money is being raised. Because there needs to be, like, when you have, like, Michelle Rempel-Garner, you know, has organized and created an organizational structure that was and is bigger than just her. Corey's campaign was bigger than just Corey. We were able to participate in at least two other campaigns, one of which wound up being a winner, because of Corey's unbelievable fundraising capacity. So there's a lot more for us to do. It just doesn't start today. today.

Zain 1:23:52

Lessons to be learned, people to be thanked, a movement to be built. Corey, sincerely, congratulations. Stephen, not so sincerely, congratulations. You guys, as a collective, that team did an incredible job. And we are going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 1866 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velji. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we shall see

Corey 1:24:14

see you next time.

Transcript