Episode 808: Tommy Douglas is Dead

SPEAKER_01 0:01

This is The Strategist, episode 808. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, what

SPEAKER_01 0:08

what is going on?

Carter 0:11

Nothing. Okay, great. Nothing at

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Fantastic. We're recording a podcast, Carter. Get

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Get on your game here. Oh,

Carter 0:18

Oh, I mean, I'm really excited about recording a podcast with my good friend, Corey Hogan, and you too, Zain.

Corey 0:26

I hear you went mountain biking in the mountains. I did

Carter 0:29

did go mountain biking in the mountains, and it was fun, and I'm a little tired. But you know what? It's not going to impact my intellectual performance, and I'm looking forward to this. No, I mean

Corey 0:40

mean when you've hit foundation, there's not much you can dig into, I guess.

Carter 0:44

You know, Corey, some of us do physical exercise. You should try it sometime. It'll be good for you.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

I just need to let you guys know the reviews are in from last – you said it's powered through your stuff. Reviews are in from last show, and everyone loves the strategy segment, segment uh which of course means that this entire episode is one giant strategy segment i know

Corey 1:02

know carter you like that uh cory it is it will give you extra time it's a show called the strategist so i guess i'm okay with that it

Carter 1:09

is fun always having to pull something out of your wazoo with no knowledge no one from no advance notice just you know have at her boys have at her boys see how you do and

SPEAKER_01 1:19

and also i'm going to jump in right now before cory forces this upon me uh please review our show uh this is of course this is of course something yeah review it uh give us five stars i feel like i feel like i feel dirty cory this feels horrible uh and but but i should mention uh we did get a couple more reviews and we've got a listener question so i'll embed that in into uh into this episode i'm sure that'll make you tremendously happy cory that we are we We are now on the streets begging for five-star reviews. This

Corey 1:51

This is feeling like a very tragic comeback tour at this point. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:55

Yeah. No one asked for this. This is like MJ on the Wizards. And people are like, wait, what? You were once MJ? And I'm like, let's just get past that. Okay, let's move it on to our first segment, Do Not Disclose. Guys, I want to talk about the new campaign finance laws here in Alberta, specifically applying to municipalities, municipalities, but also taking this concept of what's happening here in Alberta and expanding it about what role money plays in modern politics. And I think it's going to be a healthy discussion. But before we get started, just to kind of fill some folks in, Carter and Corey, you guys may have some additional items to add, but I wanted to do a quick run-through of what Alberta's new legislation looks like for municipalities. And so we have You have donation limits that have gone up. You can now donate up to $5,000 per candidate with no limit of how many candidates you can donate to. That was by the previous NDP government, Corey, if I'm not mistaken, was it set at $2,500 amongst, right, as an aggregate cumulative? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:02

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was an aggregate cumulative of twenty five hundred. Now you can donate to and PACs actually now have a five hundred thousand dollar limit during the actual election period prior to that. No limit. And if you're doing three hundred and seventy five K or less, you do not have to disclose anything in terms of any of the expenditures. And then the other big one is you do not have to disclose donors prior to Election Day. So regardless of whether you're a PAC or a candidate, there is no disclosure of who is funding you prior to Election Day. Carter, Corey, before we kind of move on into this into into kind of the strategy of this, any other elements? Because this was a pretty big bill. Any other elements that stood out to you that you wanted to highlight before

SPEAKER_01 3:45

before we jump into it?

Carter 3:47

think the one big thing that jumps out to me is that the PACs don't have to report if they spend under a certain amount of money. They don't have to submit audited statements. I think the number is 350 off the top of my head. had $350,000. It's a big number.

Carter 4:00

It's not little. And they

Carter 4:02

still have to submit reports, but they don't have to be audited. So that

Carter 4:06

that does leave a rather significant hole, given that it takes absolutely nothing to form a PAC in Alberta. It's like Corey and I are forming the anti-Zain Velji PAC. We could just do it by

Carter 4:19

by submitting a couple of forms here and we'd have it.

Carter 4:23

And And we keep it under $350,000. We don't have to submit any audited

Carter 4:28

statements, which I personally think is a pretty big hole to leave in the system. I'm sure Corey will argue with me just out of spite.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

We'll get to that in a second, Corey. But before we do, thanks for adding that thing, Carter. What do you kind of make of the legislation in general? And what are your initial thoughts when you read it or you saw it for the first time?

Corey 4:54

Well, I think it's one of those things that is going to get a certain audience very keyed up and unfortunately not have a ton of resonance outside of the deeply politically engaged who already have strong opinions as to who should win any given election. Where I think it's going to be challenging to drum up opposition

Corey 5:13

opposition to any kind of legislation like this, which does make an election less transparent, which does mean an election is more likely to go to those with money rather than, you know, be broadly distributed amongst the population, is this is really just going back to what the election law was a couple of years ago. So it's tough to say the sky is falling, that we are in this deep new world of social injustice. This is what status quo was two years ago. So, you know, it's going to be tough to get people to care.

Corey 5:40

And I think that's the challenge that opponents of this bill are going to find.

Carter 5:43

Well, and opponents for this bill, like Drew

Carter 5:45

Drew Farrell, the councillor, ran his run in

Carter 5:48

in municipal elections here in Calgary. I

Carter 5:51

I ran her first campaign in 2001.

Carter 5:54

Heather ran her campaign in 2013. 13, she

Carter 5:57

she was very much a fan of election finance reform. Election finance reform was one of her core elements. Last election, she spent $195,000 to win her riding.

Carter 6:09

Everybody's very much for election finance reform until you can raise more money.

Carter 6:14

And then once you can raise more money, you're less inclined to be a big fan of election finance reform.

Carter 6:20

And realistically, this isn't one of those pieces of legislation that destroys the fabric of democracy. There is one thing, and this is the thing

Carter 6:30

thing I agree with Mayor Nenshi about,

Carter 6:32

there is only one thing that's really bad, and it's really bad, and

Carter 6:35

and that's the listing of donors' names after

Carter 6:38

after the election. We have the technology to post a donor's name within seconds of receiving the donation. This

Carter 6:47

This is not a complex complex thing. This is easy for us to do. And it should be done because for those for the very small subset of donors or voters who care who gave to which campaigns, it allows us to make the

Carter 7:02

judgment prior to actually casting the votes.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Corey, what's your take on that, especially related to to not having to disclose donors prior to to your point, this was kind of how it was in In the old days, you never had two certain candidates like Mayor Nenshi. And in 2010, when he was candidate, Nenshi always released those donors. But do you feel like it's egregious and kind of against the democratic principle? Well,

Corey 7:28

Well, look, it's not just kind of how it was. It's kind of how it is at other orders of government and in other provinces. This is not exactly

Corey 7:34

exactly baked in as standard operating procedure within our country right now. Now, that said, it does seem to me that this is a clear improvement in the electoral process, right? Rather than having to wait until after the fact to see who has supported a campaign, where that money is coming from, you get to see beforehand. And it's really interesting to me to kind of unpack why people would be opposed to that. I mean, ultimately, it means you're a little embarrassed of your donors. You think your donors are going to cause you some sort of reputational hit. it.

Corey 8:06

I guess if I'm being charitable, you

Corey 8:09

you could say that's a bit of a distraction. The campaigns don't exactly vet donors most of the time, especially if you're talking about a lot of donors. So if you have hundreds of them, and one of them has some sort of horrible past, is that really something that the campaign should be strung up for? I don't know. I mean, that's an interesting question. But on the other hand, if you have a campaign that is funded by 20 developers who are essentially just trying to purchase City Hall, I think that's pretty important to know and

Corey 8:37

it's tough for me to see the rationale for winding that out you know undoing something that was put in there i i could maybe see not wanting to move as quickly on it but it's it was already the rules so pulling

Corey 8:48

pulling it out to me seems strange

SPEAKER_01 8:51

carter what's your what's your take on this especially in terms of this conversation cory's having around why you wouldn't want this rule in place it's

Carter 9:00

it's projection it's protect it's protect jason kenney and his His government protecting himself from the inevitable, which

Carter 9:06

which will be campaign finance reform for his his provincial legislation. They if

Carter 9:12

if municipalities are forced to release their donor list, then provincial

Carter 9:17

provincial parties will be forced to release their donor list prior to elections. They don't want that. And so this is the first step in making sure that the next provincial election is run under a set of rules. that jason kenney has uh has

Carter 9:33

has set for himself and campaign finance uh you know it's fun to talk about counselors who can raise a couple hundred grand uh

Carter 9:41

uh it's another thing to look at uh campaigns

Carter 9:43

campaigns that are two three four five million dollars uh

Carter 9:47

growing every time we do an election cycle so um

Carter 9:50

um i know that uh jason

Carter 9:53

jason kenney wants the ability to raise a lot of money because he needs He needs the ability to spend a lot of money. That's the way he runs elections. The Conservatives last time didn't

Carter 10:01

didn't worry too much about, you

Carter 10:04

you know, actually having the money that they spent. They ran a significant deficit. They need to dig themselves out.

Carter 10:09

Fundraising legislation that shields who donors are is better for donors, and donors will give them more money if

Carter 10:16

if they don't have to take public account.

Corey 10:20

I do think, to be fair, there is a philosophical view of government that is a small government view, which says that there's just not the business of government to be regulating these things so heavily and push forward. Now, that's not a view that I share, just to be really clear. But, you know, I am, like Carter, a deeply cynical person. I tend to say if you're creating legislation like this, it's because you see an advantage to yourself. but but come on i mean like we can also say that there is this

Corey 10:48

this is not just universally it must be done this way we didn't even do that this way two years ago i'm

Carter 10:53

i'm i'm a big fan of the uh no rules i think that you know money in politics isn't bad i mean this is how i make my money right like having political parties that have the capacity to pay for political professionals is in my inherent self-interest. But if

Carter 11:10

if you're going to do that, the only piece of legislation, the only thing that is really required is public disclosure. If

Carter 11:17

If someone gave us a million dollars to run a campaign, I don't necessarily believe that that is corrupt. I don't think, for example, that when someone gives a councillor $2,000 that they've bought that councillor's vote. I don't think that the world works like that. I think that someone can give you a million dollars and still not have bought your allegiance. But the population, the public needs to know that the second the donation is made because that is a factor in the election. And then political parties, like you're seeing the Democrats in the United States do,

Carter 11:53

are forced to self-regulate and change the way that they're treating money.

Carter 11:57

Virtually every Democratic contender for president didn't

Carter 12:02

didn't take money from corporations And they didn't take big money donations. They

Carter 12:07

They didn't run their own PACs. Now they're running PACs now, but they kept things quiet. They changed their behavior because they knew that the voters would punish them if they didn't. It

Carter 12:16

It wasn't legislated. It was mandated by the voters themselves.

SPEAKER_01 12:22

Corey, I want to talk to you about this concept that Carter just brought up. But before we do that, there's two things I want to hit specific here before we kind of expand the conversation further. The first one is what I'd call the S word, which is slates. We've heard about this a lot in the municipal side. Does this legislation in your mind introduce and perhaps realize the concept of slates greater than we've had before?

Corey 12:47

Maybe. I mean, when you have municipal PACs that are able to spend so much money without regulation, it certainly creates a strong incentive to organize your funding

Corey 12:57

funding around there. And there's always an economy of scale, right? If you have a PAC that is all of a sudden able to provide

Corey 13:03

provide a certain amount of base communication and base infrastructure, that is essentially a party by another name. And when you think about how parties evolved and were created, it largely happened this way, right? You had groups-coordinated activity. Municipal parties are not unique, you know, or rare even in this country. Certainly large cities tend to have them. Calgary and Edmonton have not, although I think it's fair to say in the past couple of election cycles, there's been a clear, this

Corey 13:31

this is a left-wing councillor, this is a right-wing councillor, which wasn't necessarily the case in the 90s and early 2000s. um so it's another step down that road um you'll

Corey 13:42

you'll probably not see them putting on their signs for example yes i am member of candidate x but maybe you will maybe this will be the thing that that forces some organization around that front certainly um what's what's likely to happen is um is you're going to see money in municipal campaigns like you never have before one of the interesting things about this past decade of electoral reform that we've seen in alberta even preceding the NDP, is

Corey 14:10

every time we tighten up the rules around money, the money, it's like water, it flows in a different place, and it creates a new challenge that needs to be fixed, right? And all of a sudden, there's PACs. And so we create rules around PACs. And all of a sudden, those rules around PACs create all of these loopholes, and people are making sure that they're able to get the money ahead of time and not be defined as a PAC. And so at a certain point, I do wonder if we're not just fighting something that is kind

Corey 14:34

kind of natural and embedded in society. And I'm not saying it's a good thing, but maybe

Corey 14:39

maybe we are better off with disclosure than trying to regulate the amount of money to Carter. Carter,

SPEAKER_01 14:42

Carter, this has kind of been your consistent view for a while, what Corey's introducing. Any comment on that?

Carter 14:47

I mean, forever. I was always arguing against Mayor Nenshi about his views on campaign finance reform. I always thought that we just push money into different places. And the worst place for money to go is underground.

Carter 14:59

And underground underground money is, right now it's showing up in packs, so it's not technically

Carter 15:06

But there are lots and lots of ways to spend money that will influence an election that don't show up on anybody's balance, you know, on a donor list. So my

Carter 15:16

my view is keep it as, I mean, in 2012, the donation limit to provincial parties was $30,000.

Carter 15:23

$30,000. And we had no packs. We had no organizations that were raising money trying to compete for or against another political party. We, the Alberta Medical Association, run a $2 million campaign against us. We beat them. But

Carter 15:39

But that's not the same as having a brand new political structure being created that just employs political hacks who are really good at managing lists and showing

Carter 15:55

showing people information that they want to see. Look,

Corey 15:59

Look, I want to jump on that because one of the other things that happens with PACs is you have this whole class of snake oil salesmen, political consultant come around and fleece rich people to just waste money on a cause, right? When it's with the campaigns, at least you have a certain level of professionalization that occurs.

Carter 16:18

Well, and PACs say things that parties can't say.

Carter 16:21

So are you saying,

SPEAKER_01 16:22

saying, Carter, that they have a useful place then? Well,

Carter 16:24

Well, I'm saying that they say things that we shouldn't be saying in politics. shouldn't be saying

Carter 16:28

they say things that are that are that are outside of the norm but they're not held to account the same way that a candidate is held to account if a candidate says something that's horrible or if i who's a who's employed by a candidate who says something horrible there is a consequence to the candidate there's a consequence to the campaign however

Carter 16:47

however if someone else says something horrible there

Carter 16:50

there is no consequence if the pax is so what we do is we We farm out. We don't coordinate. Of course, I'd be wrong. But you allow certain aspects of communication to go. So you get groups that are a pack that is communicating almost entirely to

Carter 17:05

to right wing religious group.

Carter 17:08

Or to a pack that's communicating to different subsets of voters, left wing unionists. Right. That that's entirely what

Carter 17:17

what the pack is designed to do is to split the communication structure and fragmented more. Well,

Corey 17:23

Well, and that single issue component is really important. I'm just going to jump in and give Zane an opportunity to go get his phone.

SPEAKER_01 17:32

didn't even know there's a landline here, Corey.

SPEAKER_01 17:34

This, by the way, for Calgary municipal election nerds, reminds me of a 2000, Carter, it was a 2007 Al Noor Kassam video where the phone was just ringing right behind him. By the way, you led that campaign. So I just wanted to just do the nerdiest

SPEAKER_01 17:50

nerdiest of callbacks of all time. Corey, please go ahead.

Corey 17:54

these packs are built around single issues and and a candidate has to weigh how much they're going to to create a mix of of issue a issue b and issue c as soon as you have a number of packs around that are just building off almost um you know whatever they want whenever they want it can really kind of wrench elections in funny ways and in my opinion not particularly helpful ways so

SPEAKER_01 18:17

so carter i want to ask you this because you'd mentioned this concept of packs let's dig dig into their financing a bit more. We got that $375K ceiling where if you spend below that, there is no audited disclosure on the back end. Talk to me about then this concept. You mentioned earlier, this is effectively self-interest by Jason Kenney. Why implement these rules on PACs? Why have the no spending limit prior to the election period? What sort of ramifications are you seeing? Or give me some of your prognostication. What are you expecting to see on the PAC front in Alberta in this upcoming municipal?

Carter 18:54

Well, I mean, the PACs are going to try and set the question prior to the election period being set. So the question for an election campaign isn't, do I want to select this candidate or that candidate? The

Carter 19:05

question is actually, you know,

Carter 19:09

are we for higher taxes or lower taxes? Or are we for replacing all the pavement on Deerfoot Trail? Or are we for fixing Crowchild Trail? Those

Carter 19:20

Those are the types of questions that actually wind up getting defining an election. And they're usually, they used to be defined during the course of an election. Someone would say something in a debate and all of it, you know, so the tunnel, the airport tunnel becomes the question or

Carter 19:36

one of the questions for the campaign in

Carter 19:39

in 2010. Should we build it? And she says yes. Hagan says no. Right.

Carter 19:44

Right. That becomes a defining

Carter 19:45

defining moment in the campaign. If a PAC can pre-spend money prior to the election period, they

Carter 19:51

they can set the question before anybody else has even started to spend money.

Carter 19:55

So the PAC is now spending money on their special interest question, and that sets the question before the campaigns even start. And now everybody has to answer the question. So

Carter 20:05

So when we see the

Carter 20:09

the reason they were spending the money they were spending was to try and influence the question. Should we

Carter 20:13

we build the green line all the way to 16th Avenue?

Carter 20:16

But they define the green line if they define their question poorly. But

Carter 20:20

But a well thought through PAC can actually define the question really well and change the outcome of an election. Corey,

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Corey, give me your prognostication. Look into that eight ball. What do you see in terms of PAC activity perhaps happening in this upcoming municipal?

Corey 20:35

Well, I think there'll be a fair bit. In a funny way, this might be worse than if we had never had these fundraising rules at all. But the fact that we had tighter fundraising rules for a while, people got used to the notion of PACs, and now PACs are defined in our legislation and seen as a very legitimate way to get involved in political discourse in a way that they weren't, frankly, 10 years ago in Alberta. Alberta.

Corey 20:58

We may have in some ways kind of legalized and normalized PACs, which previously were considered quite unusual and actually a bit awkward and not appropriate. You know, I want to jump back to what you said, though, about the

Corey 21:11

the Conservatives and whether they were bringing this in as

Corey 21:14

some sort of rule changing mechanism. And, you know, I

Corey 21:18

I guess, in a sense, sure. Yeah. But I would also encourage people to put on the other hat and just look at it from the lens of of their political opponents as well. And we have rules right now that hurt conservative candidates. They're designed to limit wealthy donors and designed to embarrass candidates who rely on them. If you're a conservative, you may think that's putting your thumb on the scale. You may think that no rules is the more fair and natural state. So, you know, it's pretty easy to get high-minded about these things in a hurry, but where you sit is where you stand. And I can

Corey 21:49

can understand why people don't like these rules, frankly. I like these rules a great deal. I think I think disclosure is a very good thing for democracy. But it's not surprising to me that people are not

Corey 22:01

not enthused about them if they think that they are hurting conservative options. Carter,

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Carter, one more comment on this, and I'm going to move on to my last question.

Carter 22:08

Well, let's start up a PAC. Let's start soliciting $10 donations. We never have to report who gave them to us, and away we go. Up to $350,000, we don't have to even put together an auditor report. Corey and I will take the money out. You'll do the work, and away we go.

Carter 22:24

Just like the podcast.

Carter 22:26

i mean the strategist pack i i don't if we don't start the strategist pack i don't even know who we are i

Carter 22:33

i don't even know who we are anymore why

SPEAKER_01 22:34

why are you broadcasting it to the world you told everyone it's so easy to start a pack and now we're going to have someone start the strategist pack after the show because of course we're going to be lazy and forget about it in the next 40 minutes but one more question for you before before actually you know what i want to jump on this for a second and cory get your thoughts what do you think of this idea and this concept that's being floated that that packs that don't have to have the reporting so the subs 375k can have one issue and four separate packs that just coordinate with each other on that issue uh you would never find out who donated to them they could run nasty you know attack ads against a slate of candidates or candidates do you feel like that's something we could potentially see i

Carter 23:12

i don't think you need four of them i think you can do it with just one i mean keep in mind what you're trying to do you're when you're when you're trying to control council all

Carter 23:19

all you're doing is trying to change the outcome of three or four council seats.

Carter 23:24

It is not trying to win

Carter 23:26

win 42 seats in an election.

Carter 23:30

You just, you know, there are already incumbents on each side. Some of those incumbents will step down. Some of them will lose. You just need to be able to influence a few of the election, of the councillors' election races. $375,000, a lot of money. You can probably move two or three elections on that if you're good. and

Carter 23:49

the thing that saves me is knowing who these people are and they're they're just not so i'm happy i'm with cory i'm okay with it look

Corey 23:56

look we're completely going to see that we we are absolutely going to see uh large organizations come in and splash in a bunch of money and uh you know evidence suggests that most of them will be pretty inept at it based on our experience with packs previously but some of them won't be and and that should concern all of us here but But like

Corey 24:14

I said, in some ways, you could have made a PAC 10 years ago. Nobody was stopping you except for the norms of the game. And this

Corey 24:22

goes back to a common theme of the past couple

Corey 24:25

couple of months of episodes here, which is the erosion of norms. So we have a situation with no norms and PACs allowed now. And that's worse, I think, than either the situation of norms pushing

Corey 24:35

pushing against PACs or the law pushing against PACs. So it will be very interesting to see what happens. But democracy ain't going to be like what democracy was yesterday once this has passed. That's for sure.

SPEAKER_01 24:45

Okay, so this last thing I want to pick up, Carter, is this concept of surpluses no longer existing. And, you know, this concept of the surplus was that if you were a municipal candidate, you can effectively hoard anything you didn't spend. If you're running next round, you apply to that, it would actually serve you for your next campaign. Now the government has said there's no surpluses, so there's an incentive to spend that money, you know bringing together your guys's points of having more spending than perhaps we're ever going to see in these municipal races but the goal was for the government to equalize this to make it fair for those that are new entrants into the race carter in your mind does this this does this legislation do that no

Carter 25:22

no because it's it's taking money that would have been saved for the next election and allowing or forcing candidate incumbents to spend it in this election so

Carter 25:31

so instead instead of saving $40,000 for next time, you're

Carter 25:34

you're going to keep all of that money and you're just going to pound down on the people who are challenging you in this particular election. So it still gets spent. It's still not fair. And the incumbents, the ones who can raise the most, are now incented to spend the most. There's no thinking to themselves, well, I wonder if I'm going to have a difficult time raising money next time. And it puts them more into the path of the donor the donor is king because if you have a war chest of fifty thousand dollars for the next campaign you don't have to beg quite as hard this time you have to beg hard and and the it just it

Carter 26:12

it doesn't make sense to me now i have seen it on the other side where provincial politicians for example have amassed massive war chests couple hundred thousand dollars yeah and the challenge you know i mean that's

Carter 26:24

that's a lot of money and then they think they that money is theirs when really it's a constituency association's money. It can get a little bit fraught. So I

Carter 26:34

like legislating that the money needs to be spent. My preference would have been that any money not spent when

Carter 26:42

you retire needs to go to charity. That was the rule, I don't know, three elections ago, or at least that was the practice three elections ago. That's all gone by the wayside. Now everybody's just spending every nickel. Every red cent that comes in gets spent. Spend,

SPEAKER_01 26:57

Corey, any comments on that particular domain?

Corey 27:00

Well, I'll have to ask you, is it a situation where the incumbent is not allowed to start fundraising for themselves until the election period?

Corey 27:08

I don't believe so. And if not, then there's still a massive incumbent advantage. So it doesn't necessarily solve that problem. You can fundraise for three years as a sitting counselor. They

Carter 27:17

They can only fundraise for the last year.

Corey 27:19

Oh, there you go. That's good.

Corey 27:21

I think that was introduced before. But you know, I mean, ultimately, you've still got an incumbent challenge. It is tough to, to

Corey 27:26

to create a level playing field when you've got the power of incumbency. And I wonder if this is not just, you know, whistling

Corey 27:34

whistling in the dark. It's I don't know if it will work. Corey,

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Corey, Corey, I want to go back to you on this with the final question for this segment, which is, you mentioned earlier that this is going to be strictly for the political class. Those have already got strong opinions on on this to begin with. Do you feel like there's any situation or any circumstance here where this particular legislation becomes a problem for kenny where it doesn't doesn't just kind of fly under the radar it expands beyond the chattering and political class and becomes a problem i

Corey 28:03

i would be surprised it would probably take such an unlikely chain of events where you are drawing an action during a municipal campaign back to the decision to change the election laws in a way that drove everybody uh to to rage um it's it's it's hard to imagine that happening and for that reason i would say this smart political parties are are

Corey 28:22

are going to remember this and they're going to be pissed off about it and they're going to think about what it means to their own political chances and make sure that they're fighting the next election on the rules as are not the rules they wish they were but

Corey 28:32

but they will also not get drawn into it this is not the kind of thing that's going to move votes this is this is such a like a relatively wonkish issue it's like a constitutional issue or something like that where some people will care a lot but those people are not really in play and um and i would really strongly encourage the ndp to stay focused on jobs stay focused on health care stay focused on education and not get distracted by this because this bill does not have any resonance with anybody outside of a small small group of people who have already made up their minds carter

SPEAKER_01 29:03

carter close us off here was this going to become an issue for kenny any circumstances that you feel like uh would would make this a bigger bigger issue than it than it may be in the next week or so no

Carter 29:13

no i don't think so i mean kenny can seemingly avoid just about anything so uh i don't think it becomes an issue it was never an issue in the last decade but it kept being fiddled with uh because the people who cared about it were in power now that's being fiddled back i

SPEAKER_01 29:28

i just lied to you i said i was going to close it off there but i am not because i've got one final thing like i know how many i know last questions

SPEAKER_01 29:36

this No, you're adding stuff to the domain. I actually wanted to introduce a listener question later on, but I want to do this one now, which is, you know, we had a listener, PJ, asking if you're one of the counselors right now, right, knowing, to Corey's point, because Corey's point just brought this up, the rules that are not the rules that you wish they were, you know, and how do you wish they were, how would you be kind of strategizing right now as one of the counselors or a mayoral candidate? Would you be doing anything different, or would you be following the rules? And the reason I ask this question is because, you know, I worked for Calgary's Mayor, Naheed Nenshi, who often liked to play the game of how the rules were or wishes how the rules were with the donor disclosures ahead of time. If you're working for one of the councillors right now, Carter, are you just abiding by the rules or are you trying to seek the moral high ground if you're strategizing?

Carter 30:24

I just follow the rules. I probably would release my donors at least in blocks, right? So maybe once a week or something like that. just because I think that that also

Carter 30:37

also sends a message, and that message is what you want. So I'd

Carter 30:41

I'd be sending that message, but I wouldn't be doing it because the legislation was such. I'd be doing it to put pressure on the other guy, whoever you're opposed to. So I'd do that because I'd then be able to say he's not releasing the information because he's getting all his money from developers, or she's getting all her money from developers, or whatever. That way we could try

Carter 31:04

try and use it as an issue, but I would take all the cash. Like if there's a $5,000 donation limit, I'm taking checks right up to $5,000. Like I'm not this

Carter 31:15

this fake rules thing where we're going to have, you know, I'm going to play by only getting $2,000 because I think that's what the rules should be. Those are the words of losers. Those aren't the winners who talk that way. Even on

SPEAKER_01 31:27

on the disclosure front, Carter, would you be disclosing your

Carter 31:29

your donors early? I'm just disclosing because I want to screw the other guy over. Yeah, right.

Carter 31:34

not because I think it's the right thing to do. It's because I think I can get a benefit out of it.

SPEAKER_01 31:42

Corey, same question to you. What would you be doing right now strategizing?

Corey 31:45

Well, it depends on your brand, Zane, and it depends on who you are. If you are working for the candidate that Carter's person is running against and you don't want to release your donors because it doesn't help you, don't

Corey 31:55

don't release your donors. That was the old rules. Now you've got these current rules. And when they come saying you should release your donors, say something lame like, oh,

Corey 32:02

oh, well, we're still working through it all and we're following all of the rules. Play

Corey 32:08

to what's your advantage within the landscape that you've got. I mean the

Corey 32:12

the rules will change. And I think ultimately where

Corey 32:17

where people get themselves into a lot of trouble is when they try to follow the rules that were or the rules they wish were because

Corey 32:24

because that's not going to help you. That's not going to help you get into a position where you can change those rules in the future, and it doesn't actually get you as much currency as we like to imagine because, frankly, that same group of people who have already made up our minds are

Corey 32:38

are the ones who care about whether you have a $2,000 limit or a $5,000 limit. There

SPEAKER_01 32:43

There we go. And now my fifth final. I'm totally joking. No, that was worth it. Thanks. Thanks, PJ, for that question. Okay, let's move it on to our next segment. It's always RIT season. Guys, I want to talk about Trudeau's COVID bump and the question that we have regarding a spring election. So, Corey, I'm going to you first.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

What is the calculus right now for Justin Trudeau if he's considering dropping the RIT for a spring election?

Corey 33:08

i mean it's summer now zane so uh it wouldn't be very good calculus 21

SPEAKER_01 33:12

21 cory i mean 2021 yeah

Corey 33:17

well i i that's so far away i mean the nature of minority governments just look at where we were a year ago look nine months ago what did the landscape look like relative to now i i think the notion that you would plan for an election nine months out is is a bit a

Corey 33:32

bit unlikely likely right at least that you're going to know what the landscape is you may say okay this is where we think we're going to move towards we're going to get our nominations done for this date we're going to be ready to roll but it would be a bit foolish to just get yourself on such a track that you can't get off it if in nine months things look very very different yeah

Carter 33:49

yeah but cory you can always get on a track and get off the track you're the government so

Carter 33:53

so you know that's only

Corey 33:55

only true in a majority situation that's not true in a minority situation

Carter 33:58

but i'd be setting the table for

Carter 34:01

for you allowing Peter McKay to continue to have his saber-rattling moment of trying to say, well, I wouldn't be voting to sustain this government. We need to go to an election soon. I'd be taking that opportunity all day long. You mean right now, Carter?

SPEAKER_01 34:19

Carter? Right now, Carter, you would start signaling that right now or after the McKay, if

Carter 34:23

if it would be McKay?

Carter 34:25

I'd feed it. I'd try and find a way that we could always have a question being asked of Peter McKay. do you favor an early election do you feel you know when you're when you're the leader do you favor some opportunity i'd i'd be making sure that you know i'm i'm background journalists know that oh boy you know we're

Carter 34:42

we're really afraid that the covid bump's going to disappear really quick we should you know we hope that peter mckay doesn't push us for an election i

Carter 34:48

i don't know i'd figure something out and then i would find a way that that this becomes uh an opportunity on whatever timeline i want i've i think the government should have always had the opportunity to call an election when they need it um this minority government uh if peter mckay continues his saber rattling that he wants an election early i would you

Carter 35:11

you know watch those polls if they don't take an immediate tip back down in in september october i think we could be seeing something as early as october 2020 and um you know march april 2021 if we don't see the dip Why wouldn't we?

Carter 35:28

Elections are about winning, not losing. So you always try and set the goals to win. Like, that's the point of it. You want to win.

SPEAKER_01 35:37

That's why our listeners come here for quotable quotes like that, Carter. Corey, would you also be seeding the ground on this? Do you feel like, I mean, I see the skepticism in your eyes. So tell me what you're thinking.

Corey 35:50

guess what I'm thinking is, as a government, I'm always trying to make sure I'm in a position where I can win. You know, when you talk about planning for an election on a certain date, that tells me you're talking more machinery. You're talking about getting nominations in place. You're building up your war chest. You're preparing. And my caution is that the minute you make that your

Corey 36:10

your modus operandi, there's

Corey 36:12

there's a bit of a self-fulfilling nature to that, right? All of a sudden, it's going to happen come hell or high water because your

Corey 36:18

your trains are on the tracks. It's occurring whether you want to or not. And so there is a risk in getting yourself too mentally locked into a date that's nine months out. What you need to be doing right now is riding

Corey 36:29

riding the situation a little bit more loosely, in my opinion. That doesn't mean that you're not right. Carter could be right. There could be an election in the fall if all of these pieces fall into place, if McKay becomes leader and says something stupid, if Jagmeet Singh becomes politically suicidal and decides he wants to go to the campaign with no money and no hope. But, you know, if you say it's happening in spring 2021, it becomes tough for it not to happen. And I'm not necessarily sure that is in the Liberals' best interest.

SPEAKER_01 36:59

Interesting. Carter, any response to that? I think Corey's comment around the particular date or seating a particular timeline may actually be strategically not beneficial. What do you think of that?

Carter 37:09

I'd be working on three off ramps, right? So you don't want to, I think that Corey's right, as much as that pains me. you don't want to set yourself to a single off ramp you should have three off ramps the three that i would devise right now would be a fall snap a spring let's go and then something that was along the lines of we're going to do our full term and government as a majority harper did that i can't remember if he went early in the third year or was it the fourth but it was it was a long minority period and they're

Carter 37:44

they're getting everything they want they're not having any problems in this minority government do

Carter 37:48

do you really need 25 more backbenchers that you can't put in the cabinet it's

SPEAKER_01 37:54

it's an interesting question i mean they're getting everything right now uh the the calculus that many people are talking about is as soon as the the deficit numbers become much more public we're kind of beyond the the concept of of covet and the pandemic that it might get harder you might have a strength in opposition with mckay uh or perhaps o'toole so that's i mean that's where the calculation comes from but am i hearing you guys both say that uh that if they feel like that the calculus is on their sides that an early election should be something they pursue is that fair to say cory well

Corey 38:28

well i would be very leery of the of the current standard in the polls um you you have you literally do not have a leader of the opposition yeah i mean i guess you have Andrew Scheer in the most literal sense, but you

Carter 38:38

you do not have a leader of the opposition.

Corey 38:40

opposition. You have a conservative party going through a bit of a awkward

Corey 38:44

awkward leadership race, is how I would put it. You have this, I'm still believing, largely artificial bump rally around the flag effect from COVID. I just, I don't know that I would be so confident that my standing is real and going to to survive into the next couple of months that I would be making plans like that. And maybe that just goes to my natural, you

Corey 39:09

you know, small C conservative nature on these things, not wanting to expose such broadsides. But the idea

Corey 39:16

idea that you would just move forward under the assumption that you're actually at close to 50% in the polls to me seems really

Corey 39:24

really dodgy. And I certainly wouldn't to build my strategy around that. Carter?

Carter 39:30

Yeah, I mean, I think that the problem with these poll numbers are they're not real, right? I mean, sure, people feel that way right now. But you have a six or seven, eight week election

Carter 39:41

election period, how do they feel at the end? Elections are where people start to pay attention. Right now, the give a fuck factor is really low.

Carter 39:50

You know, they're worried about other things. They're not worried about changing the government.

Carter 39:53

That's why I devise, you know a multiple off

Carter 39:56

off-ramp strategy you you do not want to get caught going

Carter 40:00

going at the wrong time and

Carter 40:02

and i have i i suspect the numbers will hold over the summer because ain't no one going to change their mind over the summer um and then when peter mckay uh gets to start to show off oh i'm sorry aaron o'toole i mean peter mckay uh when they get to show off in in in the fall um maybe something something happens to the liberal numbers i i

Carter 40:23

think that they're the liberals right now have nowhere to go but down but how far they drop you know two four six twenty i mean i i don't know i don't have an answer cory

Corey 40:31

cory and look trudeau is benefiting largely from the fact that the united states looks like a total effing basket case and you see so many uh different charts of this is us on covid versus this is the united states on covid we look at all of the chaos that's occurring in the united states on on a dozen different fronts and um and

Corey 40:52

we're also fixated on the united states yeah our government looks pretty good by by contrast but when it comes to a rit drop to carter's point we we stop looking abroad right we start comparing options internally and

Corey 41:03

and that can have a different effect on polls but

Carter 41:05

but can you imagine a scenario where you're running a fall election and you time it to be like the week before the uh the the the the the election in the u.s i mean you're running you're not even running against peter mckay at that point you're just running against donald trump for the whole election and i love that running against donald trump oh yeah give me that every day and then peter mckay has to try and find a way to be a conservative who runs also against donald trump it's impossible for him oh i

SPEAKER_01 41:34

i love that i love that idea carter uh that's that's probably one of the smartest things you've said on the show look

Carter 41:40

look at that no i was on fire last week oh

SPEAKER_01 41:42

oh that's true that's true it was cory that had to revise revise revise some of his strategic thinking but

SPEAKER_01 41:48

i i want to go into this because you guys are actually opening up a very interesting line of conversation which is okay so you got these these poll numbers that are artificially uh inflated you've got this comparator down in the u.s core you're talking about this contrast give me some other considerations what else are you kind of considering right now in the in the trudeau pmo or even in the liberal party as you Do you kind of inject other elements into your calculation as to whether you go or not? Or what other things are you looking at? Corey, can I go to you on this?

Corey 42:18

Sure. Well, there are some of the fundamental, do

Corey 42:21

do I have the candidates? Do I have the dollars? Am I able to actually run an election campaign on this time frame? You do need a platform of some sort, although obviously you can get away with a pretty threadbare one, especially if you're doing a bit of a don't change horses in midstream campaign, campaign as it looks like would probably be the choice especially if you're going in the fall and and comparing and contrasting to the the united states um you you want to be thinking about those same things for your opponents how is uh how is the ndp how's the cpc doing on their fundraising and their candidate side uh you want to make sure that you have all of your oppo research ready to go and um and

Corey 42:59

and then ultimately yeah you want to make sure that it's not just national polls but But on a regional breakdown, you know, riding by riding almost, you look like you can gain and that there's an advantage for you to get.

Corey 43:11

beyond that, I mean, literally anything that's in the field of politics is something that should be under consideration, right?

Corey 43:17

Is there going to be an election in this province? Is it likely to cause this kind of backlash? What is going on in Quebec right now with separatism always a consideration? And, you know, you're looking at a pretty big board and that board looks, you know, has different pockets based on regionality. Things even like the the

Corey 43:40

the referendums that are being considered in Alberta here, that that's going to play into your election timing and you're thinking about it.

SPEAKER_01 43:47

Carter, any other calculus you want to throw on the table? I

Carter 43:50

I agree with all of the things that Corey said, but I think there's two things that are completely outside of your control that will dictate the outcome of this election, the hypothetical election that Corey and I are now calling. The first is the economy. We are still sitting in a situation with millions of people unemployed or underemployed. That is a real problem. It has not yet surfaced as a problem. We haven't decided who to blame because we continue to blame COVID. But at some point, we're going to stop blaming COVID and we're going to start blaming governments. Who gets blamed for that will dictate a large swath of any election discussion. And so the economy is the first and the second, of course, is COVID itself. You know, most of our cases came from the states in our first run, you know, And we're all feeling pretty smug and pretty happy with ourselves because we're doing such a better job than the United States.

Carter 44:54

That's great. The United States is on fire. The problem is the United States is literally attached to us. We're doing the non-essential travel thing. I'm worried about essential travel at this stage. I am extremely concerned that our bounce is inevitable because they can't control. So

Carter 45:15

So those two things will

Carter 45:19

will impact any election discussion. And probably smart money, because the Liberals, especially Justin Trudeau Liberals, have tended towards being passive and not too bold. I would expect that they'll try and ride as long as they can.

Corey 45:37

Interesting. Corey? Yeah, that's really smart. Unemployment is a real problem. It's at about 14%. 100% underemployment. Beyond that, it is a real challenge in this COVID environment. And the

Corey 45:49

economy is such a wild card. And even in October, I'm not so sure we're going to be so charitable towards governments for their responses to this. We look at the United States, we feel okay. You look across the pond to Europe, they

Corey 46:02

they do not have these unemployment problems that we have right now in Canada, because they have taken different approaches to tackling COVID. COVID. From a like a support point of view, they've largely been focused on the employers instead of giving benefits like CERB. And as a result, I can't even remember what Germany's at, but it's single digits, you know, it's nothing like we're looking at here. And maybe

Corey 46:23

maybe once we get out of the shock of the moment, we're not going to be feeling so great about our government's response to COVID-19.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

Corey, I think Carter's giving me his answer saying that the Libs will probably hold on as long as they can. What do you what do you what do you think they're going to do? Do you think that if they see the opportunity, they'll go for it? Or do you feel like this is them trying to stretch this out as long as they can before they have to go back to the polls?

Corey 46:46

Oh, I think if they see the opportunity, they'll go for it. I mean, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And if McKay and Singh both, for whatever reason, decide they're going to vote against something, I think that Trudeau is going to say, fucking game on, let's go, you idiots. I don't know why you would possibly push

Corey 47:05

push yourself into this situation. The question for me is if those two parties have a sense of self-preservation and Trudeau has got to essentially pull a Harper and go to the GG and say, no, I want to go now, is

Corey 47:17

is he going to do that? If the opposition gives him the opportunity to call an election, yeah, call an election, right? Put it on their feet and do it. His biggest risk is that it looks opportunistic. And if that risk gets managed, he's going to try to finish it in four weeks and come out of it with a majority government. Carter, anything to finish

Carter 47:36

yeah i mean i think that the problem the opportunity comes from peter mckay uh peter mckay is the one who's who's done the most chat about uh election um everybody else will just stay in their bunker they will not put their head out and try and uh take this on so uh if peter mckay's smart he's uttered his last words that include election uh you know it's just but that's a pretty big if all

SPEAKER_01 48:07

all righty let's move it on to our last segment or second last segment i mean who cares about ordering this episode guys

Carter 48:14

i'm just going with it

SPEAKER_01 48:16

neck it doesn't matter our next segment the strategy scale so on the heels of what we did last week i'm don't worry guys i'm not going to make you create strategies out of the blue but i want to spend a bit more time on some of the questions that have that have generally gone into our over under in our our lightning round so i'm going to give you four situations i want you to rank their strategies out of one and one to ten and then give me a bit more depth as to why because sometimes we don't get that opportunity uh as we uh as we put these in in the lightning round uh at the end and so cory i'll start with you and the first thing that we have to discuss is jason kenney not firing his speech writer after uh a old speech of his comes out uh where he said that uh is it residential schools were a false genocide there was other items uh that came out about his past and his beliefs of lgbtq plus people uh jason kenney doubled down give me a score on a strategy i will not hold you to the fact that this is your view but give me a score on a strategy and why you think it's as such this

Corey 49:19

is a tough one um for a number of reasons um but

Corey 49:24

but let's call it a five right now here's here's my thing that

Corey 49:29

that there is no nuance in the world anymore every time a staffer f's up people call for their for their termination and um and

Corey 49:39

and i think that the public has become so used to that that i'm not necessarily sure that this isn't something that that won't just go away in two weeks right and in that sense um why rock the boat you you've got to set up you you're you're okay, you're happy with your speech writer. You don't want to be making a change. And you don't want, frankly, the opposition to draw blood. On the other hand, you've

Corey 50:01

you've got to be able to tell even when you're there when it's actually not a sports team thing, right? When it's not just the opposition trying to draw blood, but when you are actually putting yourself at pretty serious risk by keeping this person on the payroll, right? What groups are you potentially antagonizing? Is this something that is going to long-term cause you damage with the indigenous population of Alberta. I mean, we've already seen Treaty 8. It is a big priority for Premier Kenny to get the Alberta Indigenous Opportunities Corporation rocking and rolling and creating economic opportunity with our First Nations.

Corey 50:35

And are you going to be able to do that with Paul Bunner as your speechwriter? That's the question you have to ask yourself. And I don't know the answer to that. And, you know, this is, topics like these are always a bit weird for me, Zane, because these These are not abstract

Corey 50:47

abstract people. These are people I worked with a few months ago, right? But that is, I'm sure, what needs to be wrestled with. Like, okay, is

Corey 50:56

is this just the back and forth of politics? Is this going to go away? Or is there something more fundamental here that I need to address as premier? And right now, Jason Kenney seems to have taken the position that this is something that's just the back and forth of politics.

Corey 51:10

I don't know. I don't know. I'm not convinced of that. that, you know, every day there's a bit more writing that comes to surface. But I'm not necessarily saying that we won't all forget about this in two weeks either. I mean, we certainly look at the last two weeks, what we were talking about, what we're talking about now.

SPEAKER_01 51:27

Carter, what do you think on a scale of one to 10? What would you rank the current play or the lack of action?

Carter 51:34

This is two sides of the coin. Corey's right again, Again, like the two sides of the coin problem. I just think that this is coming at such a bad time. You know, the timing on this has been dredged up because of the time that we are in. We are in the time when we must show support for Black Lives Matter. We must show support for our indigenous population. That's a good thing. So when you have these types of views, I

Carter 52:03

I think that, you

Carter 52:06

I would have tossed them overboard. And in part, I would have tossed him overboard because the the response

Carter 52:12

response from the issues managers that work for Premier Kenny, led, of course, by my good friend Matt Wolf, is

Carter 52:21

is tragically bad. They pulled up a quote from, oh,

Carter 52:27

oh, come on, NDP leader Tommy

Carter 52:29

in the 1960s about homosexuality, saying people can change. Tommy Douglas is dead. He didn't change. Fuck all.

Carter 52:37

you know like i

SPEAKER_01 52:40

think we have our episode title anyways this

Carter 52:45

this is not the same thing this is a guy who a few years ago uh talked about residential schools and ignored the impact that they're having uh to this day on our on the indigenous population of canada um this is not a good play and it's a speechwriter there are more speechwriters right there are lots of speechwriters give the guy a severance send him on his way off

Carter 53:14

off we go cory

SPEAKER_01 53:15

cory you want to you want to

Corey 53:16

yeah that the tommy douglas thing was so so we so bad so

Corey 53:20

so weak i mean do we want to start dredging out what was being said at conservative conventions on the issue of homosexuality in the

Corey 53:32

I mean, it is such a phony argument. And certainly that

Corey 53:37

that view of homosexuality that Tommy Douglas espoused would have gotten you booed off the floor of an NDP convention in the 80s.

Corey 53:44

is not a relevant argument. And it also kind of shows that the conservatives are falling into that trap we always caution them not to, which is like this caricature of your opponents. Like, do they really think that that Tommy Douglas shrines exist in NDP households all throughout Alberta? Like, that's just that's just not the reality of the situation here. And I

Corey 54:07

I don't I don't know if that would be the argument I would have gone with. It is so tell you what, so not

Corey 54:14

not relevant to the matter at hand. Let's

Carter 54:15

Let's do a two for one. Let's get rid of Matt Wolf and the speechwriter. Boom. Two for one. Problem solves itself. You're better off without these people. people you're better off without them well

Corey 54:26

well listen i will say this it is pretty easy to have blood lust for these positions when they are just they seem like chess pieces when you're looking at it from the outside but these are people you know these are people you go to work with they are your friends and it is it is not easy nor should it be easy for you just to fire these people right i i really have a hard time with this notion that we're just going to remove

Carter 54:48

so let's let us return to let us return to the good old days when they would have fallen on their sword right

Carter 54:53

right when when when a political staffer who's who's drawing this kind of attention says you know what premier

Carter 55:00

am a distraction to you i should not be the government of the day is more important and what your agenda is is more important than whether or not i'm writing speeches for you why

Corey 55:10

this is my point

Corey 55:11

yeah this is my point this doesn't happen anymore because

Corey 55:14

because uh people on all political sides took advantage of that rather noble instinct and started calling calling for the resignation of every fucking person every time there was any kind of minor situation that came up. I'm not saying this is a minor situation. I'm saying that when you are calling for everybody's resignation, the

Corey 55:31

the instinct to resign to not be a distraction becomes a pretty stupid instinct to have because you're going to have a pretty threadbare premier's office if you do that. So we have lived now in a world where every time somebody's name comes up in the press, you ask for them to be fired for

Corey 55:46

for far too long. And the conservatives certainly did this to of the NDP. So this is not unique of the NDP asking conservatives. And I haven't actually seen the NDP ask for a

Corey 55:55

a ton of resignations there. I'm sure somebody will correct me on that side. But the

Corey 55:59

the problem is we do it too much. We do it so much that when you have one of these situations that actually is a stop and swallow and think about it, it's tough to actually see it for that because you have this morass of politics and this morass of histrionics that's going on all of the time and

Corey 56:16

that's that's fundamentally the challenge that both sides both the ndp and the conservatives have right now i

Corey 56:22

i you know i don't actually know where politics ends and where principle begins for either side to be frank i'm

SPEAKER_01 56:27

i'm going to move on to our next one okay same strategy scale on a scale of one to ten carter i'm going to you first trudeau refusing to release mung won joe amid the tensions with china uh so so the trudeau government refusing to to to release the Huawei executive who is extradited in Vancouver amid the increasing tensions with China. What do you make of this strategy right now by Trudeau?

Carter 56:49

Absolute A+. We don't give in to terrorists. We don't give in to hostage takers. Just because the terrorist and the hostage taker happens to be the Chinese government in this particular case, this isn't a spy swap. This isn't a Tom Clancy novel. This

Carter 57:05

This is a person who we are extraditing to the United States that we've We've we've arrested on their at their behest. This is the way the rule of law works. And just because another country has decided that they want to flex their their muscles through their totalitarian, authoritarian instincts doesn't mean we play their game. And I like what Trudeau is doing here. I'd have been stronger.

Corey 57:30

Corey, what do you think?

Corey 57:32

I mean, I agree. The minute you start bending on those things and let's be frank, we bend on them every

Corey 57:38

every now and then. them, but it causes problems when you do.

Corey 57:41

It's our previous bending on such matters, and it's, for example, Trump talking about maybe there's some room to negotiate that have gotten us to this situation to begin with. The

Corey 57:49

The only reason these actions are being taken by China is because they believe we will set aside our rule of law, potentially, and make a swap.

Corey 57:56

In the longer term, for the long-term benefit of both our country and other countries within the Western world, we need to hold firm on this issue.

SPEAKER_01 58:05

All righty, Corey, I want to go on the next one, whack again to trudeau in this case strategy of one to ten justin trudeau is now defending his government's decision to enlist a toronto-based charity we which has close ties to his family saying that they're the only organization capable of executing the government's nationwide student volunteer program what do you think of this they're effectively doubling down saying nope we've made this decision it's it's it's what we want to do give me your give me your strategy did you scale score on that ah

Corey 58:35

ah you know i

Corey 58:38

wouldn't have done it in the first place i think the notion of bringing we into it given those ties i i've got to give a pretty low score to like a one but once you're in that situation um you are sort of just confirming there is something wrong with it if you back out at this point so i you know what this is that classic double down you've just got to ride this one out and say this was the right decision to make should have known knowing that the optics are pretty dodgy. Shouldn't have done it in the first place. Now he has. He can't back out. Carter?

Carter 59:06

I object to the redefining of what a conflict of interest is. You know, a conflict of interest with a charity where you give your time and your money and your support to,

Carter 59:17

like, what are you getting back? What is it you get back from the charity? You know, it's not a conflict of interest in a classic sense. So I objected to that. What I thought

Carter 59:29

thought was wrong was to simply give this to

Carter 59:32

to this particular group and say this is the group that's going to manage it. So the conflict of interest thing is just baked. It doesn't make any sense to me, but the

Carter 59:44

the sole sourcing of the opportunity doesn't also make particularly great sense. So I'm not

Carter 59:51

a big fan of the choice, choice but i think that saying that it's because they've got close contacts with the charity is fucking ridiculous once

SPEAKER_01 1:00:00

once again carter does not give me a number but what's what's a surprise there that's

Carter 1:00:03

that's my number question was there a question they're all they're

SPEAKER_01 1:00:06

they're all numbered questions god damn

Carter 1:00:07

damn it sorry okay

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

okay i'm sure you did okay last one and i'm carter i'm going to you uh this is not a political party but frankly it's an institution very much interconnected to politics it's facebook And I want you to talk about Facebook's lack of response as advertisers have been starting to boycott them over the course of the last week or so in an intense volume with some of their biggest advertisers now joining ship. What do you make of Facebook's strategy on a scale of 1 to 10? By not saying anything, hopefully, I'm assuming, riding it out. Give me your take.

Carter 1:00:42

Well, I mean, they're trying to ride it out. I mean, double down is our go-to strategy. strategy um we've we've said it dozens

Carter 1:00:49

dozens of times on this podcast always double down i think we in fact did an episode on why you should always double down um but

Carter 1:00:59

they lost a lot of market capitalization they're going to lose more there's a story in the washington post today that that basically says that facebook has decided uh

Carter 1:01:07

uh to draw their policy lines around whatever trump is doing in the moment um

Carter 1:01:11

um that's going to hurt it's going to hurt more and the sleeping giants science type of activity that was taken against advertisers on the crazy

Carter 1:01:23

crazy right-wing Steve Bannon's websites. Breitbart.

Carter 1:01:28

That's now going to take place, and Facebook is the target. Their market cap is going to continue to drop, and they

Carter 1:01:39

to be held accountable. Facebook, Twitter, these are now publishing entities. They are no longer just web technology hosting organizations, and they need to be held to the publishing standards. That should be, I mean, I want someone desperately to run on that platform. And if it's Sleepy Joe, then that would even be better.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:58

We'll get to Sleepy Joe in a second. Corey, give me your 1 to 10 scale on Facebook's lack of action as this advertiser boycott continues.

Corey 1:02:06

Do you know, it's interesting. The way their system works, the more people that boycott Facebook, the

Corey 1:02:12

the more appealing it becomes to advertise on Facebook because there's this live auction where all of a sudden you can get these placements cheaper, which

Corey 1:02:18

which in theory will make the people who are less inclined to boycott invest

Corey 1:02:22

invest more and perhaps come in behind and fill it. So there's a bit of a market mechanism that will help them level out.

Corey 1:02:30

I don't know that it's ever been tested like this, but I can understand why they might want to just say, let's see where this goes. Let's see if this boycott actually goes anywhere, because all of a sudden, if your cost per click is going from $1.31 to $0

Corey 1:02:42

$0.13, that's pretty appealing. And there's quite a few advertisers who might be interested in taking advantage of that. So I get it. I get why they might be silent for a bit. I think that as it stands right now, I will give it an 8.

Corey 1:02:55

If we hear that it was a total flop and they've lost an awful lot of money because of it, I would obviously change that. But there's this interesting counterweight

Corey 1:03:04

to this, right? The more people who boycott a platform like Facebook or Google or whatnot, the more people who will want to jump on the platform who might not otherwise want to.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:14

All righty. Let's move it on to our final segment, our over, under, and our lightning round. Guys, are you ready?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:19

Totally. That wasn't the lightning round? That was not. No. I mean, I gave a giant – is no one listening to me? Jesus Christ. Not really. No. We get the questions sometimes. Okay. Here we go. We're going to go much quicker. We're going to go less in detail. I wanted to explore those topics a bit more. Corey, over to you for the first one. On a scale of 1 to 10, Trump's team this week says that the election is Biden's to lose. All the pressure is on him. This game of expectation setting, what do you give that lack of strategy? I don't even know what to call that. What do you give that strategy a score of?

Corey 1:03:52

I like it a lot from the point of view of somebody who wants the United States to continue to be a democracy because it's going to make it that much harder for Trump to claim the election was rigged when he ultimately does lose it. So so the system wins in this case. Right. We can all breathe a little bit easier that Trump is acknowledging that he is not currently winning the election. As far as strategy goes, I think it's a bad one for Trump because Trump has always tried to be the guy who's like, no, I'm I'm I'm a winner. I win. And you can't be the winner who's down by 15 points, 10, 15 points. So Carter, what do you make of this telegraphing? I

Carter 1:04:28

mean, their staff's out on an island again, and he's just going to ignore them anyways. So the guy with the big megaphone is going to tell everybody the election's fixed, the polls are fixed, I'm already winning, don't even worry about it. And then when they lose, everybody's going to be shocked and heavily armed.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:44

Corey, it is report card season because last week on the show we had talked about Aaron O'Toole saying that if something stupid was the reason of this data leak for Aaron O'Toole, he would look very silly. Corey, with the developments that had happened this week, both explain a little bit of the developments and then give him a letter grade as to what you'd give Aaron O'Toole, now knowing a bit more.

Corey 1:05:10

uh well there's the first back and forth was peter mckay saying you emailed your passwords to 300 people that was pretty funny and then there was somebody who came out and said no no it wasn't jamie lol i went to him and he said he didn't want it so i mean this was when

Corey 1:05:27

when we were talking about it and you said to me zane something along the lines of like yeah but this won't play out there and i said well maybe it will maybe we'll find out it's really dumb really quickly and it's going to be really embarrassing for Aaron O'Toole. I think I'm

Corey 1:05:38

I'm amazed by how quickly that came to be. I think this

Corey 1:05:42

this is not looking good on Aaron O'Toole. No matter what happened, it's pretty clear that this is just Aaron O'Toole's campaign not knowing its head from its ass.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

Yeah, you're giving that

SPEAKER_01 1:05:52

F, Corey, on that letter grade, I assume? I give it a head from ass minus.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:57

Carter, what's the report card on this particular, can I even call it scandal, that Aaron O'Toole tried to drudge up? I

Carter 1:06:04

want to be the guy who's reaching out to Jamie Law right now and offering some sort of financial settlement.

Carter 1:06:09

That's going to be my favorite part.

Carter 1:06:11

Hey, Jamie, how you doing, man? Yeah, it's Steve. I'm calling from the campaign. I hear no tool. How much you want?

Carter 1:06:19

That's where we are. That's where we are right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:23

Oh, my goodness. Give me on that same issue. What do you give Peter McKay and how he dealt with it? Corey, like was was was him just saying that line and then walking away, like not having any doubt whatsoever about his campaign and their and their illegal activity? Do you feel like that was the right approach?

Corey 1:06:41

was the most impressed I've been with the BK.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:45

what I was going to say.

Corey 1:06:46

say. No, I'm serious. He just he just dropped the hammer. He's like, you're a fucking idiot. Absolutely didn't happen your way. And then we've spent the last week talking about what a clown car Aaron O'Toole's campaign has been. this this has been a best case scenario for peter mckay yeah

SPEAKER_01 1:07:01

yeah no kidding carter do

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

do you believe the same oh

Carter 1:07:03

oh yeah i mean peter

Carter 1:07:04

peter actually looked like a leader there for a second he just trotted it boom boom boom it was a beautiful situation for him he looked great well

Carter 1:07:12

well done already and

SPEAKER_01 1:07:14

our final question carter i'm starting to you over under on six over under on six uh the government of of alberta releasing a uh cinematically beautiful video promoting the fact that the nhl should be hosting their collective hub of games and activities in edmonton uh of course none of the footage from edmonton in fact all of the footage from a glacier hotel promo video uh which is now uh which is now circulating online carter what do you want to give this one on on over under of six i'm

Carter 1:07:49

i'm gonna i think it's always going to be under i think it's going to be enough and i think i think it's going to be enough um this is what happens when you shut down

Carter 1:07:58

uh tourism alberta like literally we have an archive of this footage for every region of canada of alberta they can be accessed at a at a finger snap and you can put together these types of videos in no time at all and instead of doing that they

Carter 1:08:14

they plagiarized it and it wasn't even about the area that they were and then their their unbelievable

Carter 1:08:21

unbelievable defense of the video they defended it as though their last their last life depended upon it and it was bullshit and again the defense led by my good friend matt wolf who continues to make a shit ton of money being an issue manager for this how does he look like is it is it kenny looks good in comparison is that what it is is Is that what it is? Does Matt have some sort of control over him? I don't know. I want to know. That was so bad.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:52

Corey, before I ask you for your over-under, tell me how you think this video got made. And what I mean by that is you were the former head of, I forget the most recent title, Public Affairs Bureau. Public Affairs

Carter 1:09:04

Affairs Bureau. No one can remember the other. Yeah, well,

SPEAKER_01 1:09:06

the communications and engagement, whatever it was. Anyways, how did this get made? Like from your, you know, perhaps not inside knowledge, but process knowledge. How did something like this find the Premier's Twitter account and then get fanned out? Because it doesn't seem like it went through that particular channel that you once controlled.

Corey 1:09:23

It seems very unlikely it came from the Communications and Public Engagement Office. The number of checks that would have had to go through both on a copyright point and also, I'll be blunt, it's

Corey 1:09:36

it's Edmontonians. Edmontonians would have been far more sensitive to that. They've lived in Edmonton their entire life. The director of marketing

Corey 1:09:44

marketing services there is an Edmontonian. The executive

Corey 1:09:47

executive director of outreach is an Edmontonian. The deputy

Corey 1:09:50

deputy is an Edmontonian. Everyone's an Edmontonian, and you're not going to make that mistake. So I have to believe that came through a different channel, whether it was a booster of the premiers or one

Corey 1:09:59

one of the premier staff who perhaps is not as sensitive to those things has not been in Edmonton long enough to realize Edmontonians

Corey 1:10:05

Edmontonians are going to lose their goddamn minds if you don't have a picture of Edmonton in it. Now, I

Corey 1:10:10

I got to tell you, it's

Corey 1:10:11

it's also just baffling from a pure craft point of view. None of these things are anywhere near Edmonton. That is clear. But the

Corey 1:10:18

the extent of how far away they are, I think, is almost a marvel. So the Washington Monument is hundreds of kilometers closer to New York City than that particular lodge is to Edmonton, Alberta. I mean, it would be like saying, visit New York. See the Lincoln Memorial. memorial visit oh

SPEAKER_01 1:10:41

that's so good you're gonna do that video tonight right

Corey 1:10:44

right are we gonna

SPEAKER_01 1:10:44

gonna make that video yeah

Corey 1:10:45

yeah we'll make that video it's really it's quite a miss it's a huge miss and also it you

Corey 1:10:52

you know what that you have to be careful about is that it really does look like you

Corey 1:10:57

you don't think there's anything redeeming about edmonton proper when you put a video like that together you're basically selling edmonton by things that are hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away and

Corey 1:11:07

that's not a good look we're

SPEAKER_01 1:11:08

we're gonna leave it there that's a wrap on episode 808 of the strategist my name is zane belgi with me as always cory hogan stephen carter and we'll see you next time

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