Episode 908: Capers, raisins and vinegar

SPEAKER_02 0:02

This is a strategist episode 908. My name is Zain Velji with me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, how's it going?

Carter 0:10

Well, I'm a little bit up later past my bedtime than I'd like to be because someone had to watch the footballs. So Carter,

SPEAKER_02 0:17

Carter, it's 8pm. It's eight o'clock, Carter.

Corey 0:20

Jesus Christ. Did you

Corey 0:21

already drink your warm milk? well and

Carter 0:23

and then i usually i usually have candy so that i can stay awake because you guys kind of you know bore me so

Carter 0:28

so and i have no candy because we ran out of candy today so it's

Corey 0:33

pretty tragic start to the night really you got no worthers and you're past your bedtime this is yeah fucking tough for you cory

SPEAKER_02 0:39

cory we need to re-up him on his amazon prime oval teen shipment so just make sure you get that shit done how are you doing cory you seem uh you seem wide awake because like we said it is 8 p.m yeah because i am uh

Corey 0:52

uh you know an adult who can stay up at eight o'clock uh i'm doing pretty good it was a it was a busy weekend it was nice here in calgary and

Corey 0:59

and uh so i expected carter to regale us with tales of outdoors but i guess this time of year nice is bad because you like to go out when it's cold yeah

Carter 1:08

the colder the better everybody's out on the ski hill and i wasn't given the opportunity because i booked too late so i had to stay home today it's It's very – I mean, really, today's been a disappointment, not just

Corey 1:17

just because of you guys. I don't know why I opened up another round for you. I'm sorry. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02 1:21

Yeah, I don't know. What did you do? No, this is – I mean, I wanted to know about your weekend, not about a deflection to

SPEAKER_02 1:28

Carter, you know, this show is a safe space. So, like, do you want to voice any concerns about, you know, people of color learning how to ski and how it's bothering you and anything like that? No. Go

Carter 1:38

It's the white people that make me crazy.

Carter 1:41

They are nuts. They're nuts. Yeah, it's always happy to see a visible minority on the Hill. It's great. And to be honest, way more. Honestly, like all joking aside, the pandemic has opened up, I think, a whole groups of new demographics to outdoorsville. Not you, Zane, because you're lazy,

Carter 2:02

many, many others. And it's good to see.

SPEAKER_02 2:04

I'm what they call an old stock racialized person in that I

SPEAKER_02 2:07

just do what we usually

SPEAKER_02 2:10

Corey gets very uncomfortable. He thought I

Carter 2:13

I was going down, but it's you who's going to go down. That's good.

SPEAKER_02 2:16

Corey, we're just about to talk about a Muslim in cabinet, so brace yourself. But as a fellow person for the Northeast, Corey gets very uncomfortable when we talk about race issues. We talk about the race issue. We talk about the tough stuff on this podcast, Corey. You've gone soft on it. We

Carter 2:29

We tackle the tough issues.

SPEAKER_02 2:31

Yeah, yeah, which now brings me to our first segment, our Quranic recitation by Corey. Please take it away.

SPEAKER_02 2:40

let's move it on to our first segment every day i'm shuffling guys i want to talk about the trudeau cabinet shuffle the mini cabinet shuffle and perhaps less focused on the cabinet shuffle but more so what it could mean and and i think what the speculation around it does mean so just to set forward the facts david baines uh minister of of innovation also mp from mississauga uh has declared he's no longer running. So the decision not to run Prompton Trudeau to shuffle Baines out of the innovation portfolio, replacing him with Francois-Philippe Champagne, who is taking over the quickly evolving file, which means his foreign affairs job has now gone to Marc Garneau. And the transport job now goes over to rookie cabinet minister, but certainly not rookie MP Omar Al-Ghrabra, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Do you guys know the correct pronunciation? I just want to make sure I get that right.

Carter 3:32

I always defer to you, Zane. Whatever

SPEAKER_02 3:34

how I say it. It's

SPEAKER_02 3:35

You know, he's been an MP for so long, but I don't know how to pronounce his name. Algarbra, I think, is how I say his name. So if you do want to correct me on the show, please do. So that's the state of affairs. What's really interesting about this, at least how I find it, you have one Mississauga MP leaving for another being replaced in cabinet. This is the new transport minister, that is. So the Mississauga importance really making some headlines. But the main headline here is that the

SPEAKER_02 4:03

the election readiness, people saying that this is Trudeau getting ready for an election. So Carter, I want to start at the very simple, you know, starting point here, which is, why do people associate a cabinet shuffle with an election? Can you just help us understand the basics here before we kind of go down some of the strategy and some of those elements?

Carter 4:24

I mean, it's relatively straightforward in that you don't want your cabinet to be taken up, your commodity, your vital commodity or valuable commodity of cabinet slots to be taken up by ministers who aren't going to run again because it is more likely to get a minister re-elected than it is just to get an incumbent MP. And

Carter 4:44

And of course, it is more likely to get an incumbent MP than a challenger. So what you're doing is you're trying to move as many people up the ladder as you can to try and get them all re-elected. So there's no sense in wasting that power, if you will, with somebody who's not going to be running again and therefore will not be part of your next government. So it's a relatively standard practice before an election to take a quick temperature

Carter 5:09

temperature gauge of all of your MPs and all your cabinet ministers and say, are you planning to run again? And if not, then you can reshuffle the cabinet. This is a relatively minor one. Before elections, you will sometimes see more major shuffles. I am a big fan of the major shuffle before an election. It allows the new minister to kind of walk away from bad decisions made by the previous minister and give your government a little bit of space between those. But this was a very small shuffle, just allowing the electoral

Carter 5:41

electoral benefit to be passed to others who will be carrying the baton forward.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Carter, that's very helpful. So the minister portfolio kind of gives you a shot in the arm as an MP, helping your electability for re-election. Corey, anything you want to add to that in terms of kind of the baseline of why a shuffle is so often associated with perhaps an election call?

Corey 6:04

Well, for all of the reasons Stephen said, I don't know that it's entirely as simple as that, because if that were the only reason, then you would always put ministers in marginal seats, right? Because that would make them more likely to win. But we find quite often ministers come from safe seats because you put really high profile people in safe seats. So you find almost the opposite happens. I think it has probably as much or more to do with the overall feel of the government. And the fact is, a minister can be out there making pronouncements. And if they are going to be the minister going forward, that's different and probably of higher political value than somebody who is just keeping the lights on on their way out the door. Now, Stephen's absolutely right. It's very common pre-election. to have a pre-election shuffle. I feel maybe it was more common in the past. I'm going to have to run some statistics

Corey 6:51

statistics on that. But certainly, it used to be back when we didn't have fixed election dates everywhere, one of these great harbingers, you'd see a cabinet shuffle that sort of happens for no reason in the middle of March. And you'd think, okay, well, you can almost sort of set your watch to when we're going to have an election. And really, it's every time you go into an election, you want to present yourself a fresh face, even if you're an incumbent government of multiple terms. and um a cabinet shuffle especially bringing in new blood especially letting the and that's the other thing you

Corey 7:22

you want the new blood and if somebody's retiring they can't really hold it against you if you pull them out of cabinet so it's just a great opportunity to reset and get that shot in the arm for the government overall do

SPEAKER_02 7:31

do you do do you also agree with carter that like this shuffle strategy you're a fan of especially of trying to you know oxygenate if i can call it that uh from bad decisions like that particular element of it do you do you buy into that or do Do you feel like that voters are too smart or, frankly, perhaps the opposite of that, so clued out of that, of who, which minister did what, that they just, your government wears it regardless?

Corey 7:56

I feel like it was more common in the past because it mattered more in the past. We've certainly seen more centralization in premier's offices, prime minister's offices. And for that reason, it just matters an awful lot less who your ministers are than it did in times of your, you know, we always idealize the times of the past. But it's certainly true that when you look at a prime minister like Chrétien, the ministers were, you know, much more autonomous and had much more individual authority than they do under Justin Trudeau or under Stephen Harper, for that matter.

SPEAKER_02 8:25

Carter, does this mean what we saw this week, I should say, to be clear, does that mean that an early call is inevitable in your mind?

Carter 8:33

I think that the prime minister himself let it slip in his year-end interviews that there would be an election in 2021. i see no reason not to trust him uh and and accept that that will happen i think it's just an open question as to whether or not it will happen in the spring uh versus that whether or not it will happen in the fall and i think that that is entirely um based on how the uh vaccination program rolls out if uh things go better than expected i would expect to see that we would you know see an election in the spring if things don't go as well um then then maybe the election should be pushed off. But the budget is certainly going to be signaling a different era in Canadian politics. The era of the pandemic, hopefully will be over. And that will perhaps require a new mandate from the people of Canada for the federal government. That certainly will be the spin.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

What do you make of what Carter said here? And do you feel like some of these moves coupled with other things, including new mandate letters to ministers, which I should mention as well, which

SPEAKER_02 9:37

which includes some of the elements from the September throne speech. Do you feel like, you know, this concert of things is starting to indicate an inevitable spring election in your mind?

Corey 9:47

Well, it's as close as possible to inevitable as close as these things get. It's never 100% inevitable. But this was really foreshadowed in the fall. We talked about this in the fall, when there was this speculation, will we end up at the polls as a result of the the throne speech and then the ndp at the you know last minute is maybe an exaggeration but decided to support the throne speech and then the risk of an election was entirely gone the um i

Corey 10:12

think i suspect that at least for the start that's going to be the model you know you you push people into almost daring them to bring you down because you don't want to look like you're too opportunistic there will probably be a point just as there was under harper where you almost trying to orchestrate a disagreement and maybe even trudeau takes a page out of the harper playbook which was a shitty playbook but it worked where he says yeah they agree to support us but they don't really support us we need a new mandate let's go to the polls and then all of a sudden you've got the what the 2008 election i think it was so yeah

Corey 10:44

you know so that that's certainly i think possible if not downright probable and will they go in the spring why do they want to go in the spring it's not just the question of vaccines although that's a huge part of it i think they're They're going to go even if vaccines look somewhat middling, you know, like it looks like it's OK or it's on a path towards where you could reasonably say, yes, Canadians will all be vaccinated by fall, as they've promised, because they need to get to the polls before the bill gets in. I think I really want to stress that Canadians right now are still living COVID-19. We're all I mean, here we are yet again for we're moving into a year of recording this podcast from our basements. right and uh individually and then and doing it over over over the internet but when um

Corey 11:28

when canadians are all vaccinated when life gets back to normal when we almost take for granted the fact that we had this giant crisis that we have to go through and then we have to pay for all of the supports and all of the programs that occurred for the past few years and we've got this enormous deficit and we're not quite sure what to do with it that's when things are going to get real in a hurry. And then historically, that is when Canadians, well, this is a lazy over generalization. But, you know, conservatives, for whatever reason, you know, all evidence to the contrary, tend to get the pass on the deficit, you know, they're seen as fiscal hawks. So if Canadians are in a mood to tighten the finances, they might be more in the mood to go to Aaron O'Toole than they were previous. So yeah, I think it's almost an imperative that the Liberals go to the polls this spring.

SPEAKER_02 12:11

Interesting. So you call it an imperative. Carter, talk to me, Corey's brought some interesting points. But the one I want to pick on right here is a strategy question. Let's talk about strategy for a second. There's many elements to strategy. What issue is your leading indicator? You've talked about vaccines. We'll get into that in a second. But Corey brings up an interesting point, the strategy of how to call it. Because one of the things we have baked in as an assumption, even when we were recording in the, and you can tell me if you no longer agree that this is a valid assumption, in the summer and fall was the fact that the Trudeau government doesn't want to necessarily get blamed for calling an election, to Corey's point as well, right? So if you're strategizing right now for the liberals, what would you suggest? Would it be to orchestrate a disagreement, like Corey said? Would it be to take a page out of the Harper playbook? And more fundamentally to this point, do you agree that the Trudeau government still has to de-risk themselves as much as they can from being blamed for calling this election during a pandemic. How are you, if you're advising, navigating this sort of tightrope for the Trudeau Liberals?

Carter 13:13

I think that, you know, I started to foreshadow that in my last answer, and I don't

Carter 13:18

don't know that they can avoid taking the blame for it, because I don't think they're going to, you know, there's not going to be, you

Carter 13:24

you know, the NDP aren't going to force

Carter 13:26

force an election by voting against the budget. It's just highly unlikely to happen. So there will not be that that falling of the minority that would remove all blame but you would have there's an impetus there's a reason or a rationale that needs to be discussed and that is things are fundamentally different we now see the end of the pandemic we see the end of this of this uh recording in our basements model uh that that cory alluded to although i have a sense that cory will never let us in his house anyways but you know this this this is its own reason right so you don't necessarily have to have the reason of the other guys no longer support me so much as you can go with the reason that you know um the this is we need a new government we need a new mandate uh why i ran two years ago is no longer the valid reason for running right i mean i would love for kenny to to to to say you know what i ran on two years ago i can't continue to stand on today my My platform must change. Therefore, I must come forward and ask for a mandate shift. So I think that Trudeau can say that. I think it's just filled with a little bit more risk because it's fairly clear that you are bringing it, even though you can still govern as though you have a majority. And Trudeau has, to this point, governed like he has a majority.

SPEAKER_02 14:44

Corey, same question for you. What would you, out of even some of the things you suggested as options, what would you recommend right now for the Trudeau government in terms of trying to de-risk blame on calling an election? And is there any particular tool or strategy that you favor more so than any other?

Corey 15:04

So I feel we're getting to the point where the de-risking that's required for orchestrating your own defeats, just the same de-risking any minority government has to do. The 2008 equivalent with Harper is, I think, apt in a lot of fashions because, you know, the

Corey 15:17

the threat of you've called an election during COVID, how dare you? I mean, people are kind of numb to elections during COVID at this point. We've been living the fact that America has been in an election for many months. We've seen elections in many provinces at this point. They just don't seem like the big deal that they did a while ago. And so I don't know that they're going to take a hit for calling an election during a global health emergency anyway. I mean, we're

Corey 15:41

we're a year in, right? We're getting very close to a year in at least. And these things don't have the same effect. We've said it many, many times, but we're all just frogs in boiling water here. But say the B.1.1.7 variant

Corey 15:54

variant takes off or something to that effect. Well, maybe I would change my opinion. But right now, I guess, Zane, I preamble all of that to say he doesn't need to do a ton.

Corey 16:04

There is precedent with Harper. There is the reality that governments don't tend to be held to account for this. You see recent examples as recent as British Columbia. Carter has given the words that Carter said are the words they're going to say. They were the words I was going to say if you came to me first, which is things have changed a lot. The pandemic's over. We need a mandate for what's next. context, it's the easiest thing in the world for a government to say, and you know what?

Corey 16:29

Kind of makes sense. These guys were all elected under, guys and gals, were all elected under entirely different situations.

SPEAKER_02 16:36

So, okay, let's make that the assumption, the working assumption. That's their message. They've got a timeline of, I think we've largely agreed, spring, Carter, you've introduced fall, and I want to pick up on that in a second. But let's talk about the opposition parties, right? Let's talk about O'Toole. Let's talk about saying, what are they What are they trying to do? What should they be doing in this intervening period? Like, is there something that either of them can do to, I

SPEAKER_02 17:01

don't want to say push back against that positioning, but what would you be doing, Carter, if you were either O'Toole or Singh to knowing that, you know, our

SPEAKER_02 17:11

our thinking here, I think is solid, perhaps not novel, that this story is already out, that at some point, you know, that the Trudeau government will say a permutation of the words we've just said. and it'll probably fall in the calendar horizon of spring or fall. What are you doing if you're the other two parties?

Carter 17:27

Well, I think that what I would be doing is different than what they are doing. I mean, I think that they need to carve out their own positioning in a brand structure that is palatable to Canadians and try not to do that in terms specific to the Liberal Party, right? What do

SPEAKER_02 17:43

do you mean by that? Too

Carter 17:44

Too often we define ourselves by our opposition rather than by the strengths that we have internally. And I think when you're defining yourself by the other guy, You are inherently defining the other guy's strengths, right? You know, Hertz is number two in rental cars, right? Well, they're bankrupt now. So

Corey 18:00

So they try harder. Yeah,

Carter 18:01

Yeah, except they're bankrupt. Yeah, but they're bankrupt

Carter 18:03

So I win. You

Carter 18:06

know what it was? It's

SPEAKER_02 18:06

It's just that they didn't pick you up. You

SPEAKER_02 18:09

You know, it was the whole fact that they didn't pick you up like Enterprise. Carter, keep going. Very

Carter 18:12

Very sad. But Singh and O'Toole are, you know, they need to be describing themselves as what they

Carter 18:19

they really want to govern as. They want to give us more power and more strength. I think we've talked about Singh's problems quite a number of times where he's kind of trapped in his own structure, his own bubble of the liberals are taking from him and the Green Party is taking from him. He needs to define himself differently. And the same has

Carter 18:40

has to happen with O'Toole, right, where he has to define himself differently than just the opposition to Trudeau. And this is my problem with them up to this point. They never really worked at that. They've always stood on the, we're the opposition, we oppose these ideas. Never on, we're the opposition, and this is how we think things should be done.

SPEAKER_02 19:01

Corey, any comments you may have around what O'Toole or Singh need to do, knowing that some version of what we're saying here probably happens in the spring or fall this year?

Corey 19:11

Well, I think, like I said, I think it's the spring. But they're doing it, right? Right. Singh is going around saying everything you like about the liberals' response is actually because of me. O'Toole is putting out Twitter posts, I'm sure we'll talk about, saying

Corey 19:25

saying what a moderate he is and trying to define his party on more election-friendly footing, I think, than perhaps we've been subjected to from the conservatives in the past bit. But everybody here is jockeying for position. And, you know, rarely do I say that. Does anybody say that? And I actually mean position, but that's what we're talking about here. They are trying to make sure that they are where they need to be when this starting pistol goes. So, you know, I just – I

Corey 19:53

I think if you want kind of more evidence that an election is coming, look at the opposition leaders. They have the same fatalism about it that the liberals seem to have. And when all of the parties have that fatalism, I

Corey 20:08

I mean, it's like a march towards the guns of August here. It's just going to happen. And, you know, now it's just what's the spark that's going to set this all off?

SPEAKER_02 20:17

Carter, tell me some considerations in your mind that the liberals need to look at to not go, to not go this spring. Is it a failure in vaccines? Is it the fact that they don't have enough candidates nominated? And I want to talk about that as well. Like what other what considerations if you are effectively part of, let's call it the Greenlight Committee of another sort, not the Greenlight Committee to Greenlight candidates, but to say, are we going or not? Are you constantly bringing up to the leader and the party apparatus to say these are the metrics that I'm looking at to say that we're in good health to hit go on an election? What are the considerations in your mind if you have a few?

Carter 20:54

Well, you don't want to have a recent failure before you do. You recall the election. I think the only recent failure that is at hand, and of course, you can't always predict these things because, you know, when you're in the federal government, they'll fall from the sky occasionally.

Carter 21:09

But the only potential failure between now and the call dates are some sort of tremendously bad financial news or the vaccine failure.

Carter 21:21

So those two pieces of failure you'd be watching for. And the measurements on that are going to be in your polling. Are you seeing – so we always see the top-line questions. I would like to see the second-line question, like how committed are you to voting liberal? How committed are you to voting conservative? How likely are you to change your vote? Those types of questions are ones that I would be monitoring. And as long as I was keeping a relatively high I'm not likely to change my vote metric, I'd be going. There is no downside. There is only upside for them to go now. They have information at their fingertips that will tell them how likely it is to win. And they're not focused on areas like Alberta and Saskatchewan. It's BC, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic Canada. That's it. So it's a relatively easy election to run because you don't have to worry about balancing off the prairie provinces. You can just ignore them and our relative craziness when compared to the rest of the country.

SPEAKER_02 22:24

Corey, any considerations that you're looking at in terms of not going between now and the spring, as you've suggested?

Corey 22:33

Yeah, I mean, elections are when people pay attention. And when they think an election is coming, they might pay more attention. But if this election somewhat hits Canadians on the side of the head, I don't know it will entirely. But I'm not sure people are walking around saying there's an election, there's an election, right? I mean, in a moment like this, in particular, people are prone to conflate government approval with COVID response, because that's by far the biggest thing that's going on right now. An election conversation probably won't look like that. I mean, just look at British Columbia. The COVID response was obviously the biggest situation going in. The BC liberals couldn't make COVID response the issue of the day to save their lives, because we're all sort of saturated and defined on that. We get that one. So if I'm the liberals, I'm looking for early warning signs about what kind of risk is there. Carter talked about who other people might be open to.

Corey 23:19

I'd say, how do you feel about individual issues? What issues are brewing beneath the surface that might become big conversations? And actually to put more of a bow on it, when people pay attention, you can get a pretty good sense right now. Don't ask me to say it because I wasn't ready

Corey 23:34

ready for it, but like what the NDP and conservative ballot questions are, you're going to have a pretty good sense, right? Right. So if you're the liberals, I'd be polling on these and saying when people start paying attention to these NDP and conservative ballot questions, will they like them? Do they have resonance? What's the risk? How movable are people right now? Are they just sort of locked into camps, be damned, or are they actually kind of exhausted and ready to try something new? And a lot of that disappears in top line horse race numbers that that media organizations love to look at. So I think that the liberals need to be very careful, as advice always for political parties, but be very careful not to believe the press and your own press. Start looking at where perhaps the ground is a bit softer than it looks from those top line numbers, because I think that there's

Corey 24:19

there's a lot of danger in going into an election when everybody is consumed with one issue that will not be the ballot question.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

Carter Corey brings up ballot questions. Let's talk about that for a second. If you are the liberals right now, what are you preparing for in terms of the shift? Because both, you know, I shouldn't say both, but the other opposition parties are going to try to shift the question, right? If you want it to be a referendum on your COVID response, and you feel like that's your pathway to victory, the others might be trying to make it a referendum on Justin Trudeau and his leadership and ethics. But what do you feel like the liberals need to be aware of in terms of that shift i

Carter 24:55

think that they need to be worried about whether the the the question shifts from um do we want someone who can manage a

Carter 25:03

a pandemic response we want someone who can take care of us to a question of do we want someone who can manage the economy better um one of the things that is is sheltered in this pandemic is the unemployment rate uh canadians are more unemployed than than certainly we'd like to be inspired and you can see regional disparity in that and unemployment is one of those things that that is very uh germane to the national discussion right governments fall when unemployment is high and unemployment is high now um i think that this is one of the things that they're trying to to factor in is um do we go now before people realize how high the unemployment rate is like obviously people know they're unemployed but uh there's support after support after support uh taking care of them what's going to happen And when those supports, when those COVID supports disappear in the coming weeks and months. So I think that shifting from the pandemic response question or the taking care of us question to who's going to build the economy moving forward question is the biggest threat to the Liberal government as it ponders these election questions.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

Carter, I've got a question for you specifically, because it's from something you said, which I thought was really interesting, which is just a great ground rule. You don't want to hit go if you've had a recent scandal of some sort, which kind of reminds me of opposition research. And the conventional wisdom with opposition research is that you release it during the campaign when it hurts the most. And I feel like that's right, as assumed with my next question. But I wanted to get a sense from you. Is there any world in where if you're the conservatives or the NDP holding on to a Trudeau scandal right now, and you know their game plan of the spring that you release it early? Or does this stay within the confines of an election? I think conventional wisdom would say the latter. But I wanted to just stress that with you just from the fact that you brought it up. And I thought it'd be interesting to just get your thoughts on.

Carter 26:59

Yeah, I mean, I think there's an open question as to when things cause the most damage. Generally, you know, you're playing a bit of craps when you're releasing something with 10 days to go. Because sometimes it can take off. Yeah,

Carter 27:12

I mean, sometimes it takes off and sometimes it just fizzles. And we've seen that in the past where you can see either a government or an opposition party just shopping around these potential scandals. Oh, this is a big thing. Look at this. Look at this thing that's huge. and it just doesn't get any legs and now you're 10 days out from the election and now you're trying to shop other things out i know that when we did you know the 2012 election everybody remembers is the lake of fire election here in alberta and everybody's like oh that's you know really brilliant you guys waited until 10 days out to do the lake of fire we didn't do the lake of fire the lake of fire happened it is a different thing we shopped scandal after scandal after scandal for 35 days prior to that and they just weren't taking um so sometimes you don't get to control it so my advice is probably not to wait too long into the you know maybe a week or two before the election is expected um start start laying the groundwork because these the other thing is it's never a day it's a ground it's it's a bunch of groundwork that establishes a pattern pattern um you know a government does not fall or not fall whether or not one person pees into a coffee cup cory

SPEAKER_02 28:23

cory same question for you any any comments on oppo research if you have something right now um are you was peeing into a coffee cup a scandal of some sort yeah how do you not remember

SPEAKER_02 28:34

this you're both giving me no no hold on you're

SPEAKER_02 28:37

you're both giving me a look so remind me what What this was, before I ask you the same question, Corey. A

Corey 28:41

A conservative candidate was caught on video peeing into a coffee cup and then pouring it out when he was a contractor in somebody's,

SPEAKER_02 28:48

somebody's, I can't remember what kind of work he was doing. This is the second podcast episode in a row where we've talked about someone taking a piss in a sink, by the way, to let you know. On You the People earlier this week, you had definitely made mention of it. But, of course, with the Trump family's addiction to toilets and showerheads, this, of course, referring to the Ivanka and Jared household where the CIA or their Secret Service were not allowed to take a piss in their home.

Corey 29:15

was Gary Bantz. He lives on forever. He's a legend.

SPEAKER_02 29:18

Corey, APA Research, is conventional wisdom in this case conventional for a reason in that it works because you release it during the campaign? Or if you're hanging on to something right now, knowing the broad strokes of a liberal plan, what they're positioning for, for maybe a spring call, is there value in trying to tease something out right now? Oh, well, it entirely depends on the story. If

Corey 29:38

If it's something that Canadians can immediately understand and wrap their heads around, save it for the election. If it's big, easy to understand, election. If it's something that's going to require a bit of legwork by the media, if it's going to require some people to wrap their heads around, if it's going to need conversations, follow up, get

Corey 29:55

get it out when you can get it out. Because otherwise you may find yourself in a situation where it doesn't come to culmination until after all of the ballots have been cast, especially nowadays, Zane, right? Where we all start casting our ballots with weeks to go in the election period. Something that I absolutely loathe, by the way. I just hate to death all of the early voting we do now. know, and not because I have a problem with mail-in ballots, I have a problem with people casting their ballot when there's still weeks of campaigning left.

SPEAKER_02 30:23

Yeah, yeah. Corey, I'm going to do a little bit of a retrospective. If it was blackface, brownface, would that be a today or election story? That's an election story.

SPEAKER_02 30:30

story. If it was, if it was We Charity, would that be a today or election story?

Corey 30:34

I think that's a today.

SPEAKER_02 30:35

Interesting. Okay, so that gives me a good, like, like flagpost as to what that looks like. The last thing I want to talk about with you guys is ground game. You know, one of the things that you hear a lot of chattering about is that the Trudeau government would no way be ready by the spring they've got so many candidates to nominate the the infrastructure isn't there i want to i want to get your guys's like expertise on this because you guys are both like like i i people can't see this you guys are shaking your head being like what the fuck are people talking about i want to actually like dispel a myth here right because of how quickly this happened so cory you were you were the most animated i'll go to you first and then carter you can jump in thereafter you'll

Corey 31:10

you'll get a phone call if you are the campaign chair for a province and you're going to say you have one week go and they will go they will figure it out can we clarify one week to like nominate your whole get it all done oh

Corey 31:20

well and you know what you're not going to get them all done in a week you're going to get some of them done the week after that but you're going to get it done and what's going to happen is all of a sudden you're not caring so much about contests you will be sitting in a room with a bunch of well it's times you'll be sitting on a zoom meeting with a phone over here you will be going writing

Corey 31:37

writing by writing where you do not have candidates and you will work in the phone who was the past candidate Is the president willing to run? What about board members? And you're literally just

SPEAKER_02 31:45

just calling and asking me like, hey, could you be

Corey 31:47

And you will literally fill that in a week if you need to do it. If it needs to be done in a week, it can be done in a week. There's no question in my mind about that. Now, are you going to get the best quality candidates?

Corey 31:57

Depends, right? But as we've seen time and time again, you know, welcome

Corey 32:03

welcome to being a human being. You know, there is nothing that drives you like a deadline. And these things can move very, very quickly if you need them to. Do

SPEAKER_02 32:11

Do you know, Corey, they often you have these 30 on 30 sports stories about the fifth round draft pick who like made it like a Tom Brady, for example,

SPEAKER_02 32:19

right? I'd love to know what the political version of that is.

Corey 32:22

is. Oh, I got it for you. Who's like the

Corey 32:24

call that was just a super – I'll tell you who it is.

Corey 32:26

is. Who is it? In 1984, there was – I think he was a FedEx guy. He might have been UPS. He came to the Conservative Party headquarters. They signed him up to be a candidate. He won.

Corey 32:36

This is how it works sometimes. Actually, you know, the NDP is just rife with those stories too in Quebec. Absolutely. Actually, the

Corey 32:44

NDP here in Alberta. I

SPEAKER_02 32:46

I think there's a ton of surprising stories in terms of folks that you didn't think that would make it won the nomination. I'm thinking of the person who maybe was a sixth-round deep phone call when everyone said no and turned out to be a hell of a politician, someone who had tremendous upside that perhaps no one saw. They thought there was simply a paper candidate. That's a total detour, but I'd love to get deep into that series of some sort. You

Carter 33:09

You guys are missing the opportunity, actually.

Carter 33:12

Who is it? No, it's not a who. This is the opportunity for a party doesn't want to have all their candidates nominated necessarily

Carter 33:20

through a democratic process. The leader choosing half the candidates makes the leader happy. You know, like the process of nominations means that candidates that you really want, like Alison Redford wanted Farouk Adadia to be her candidate. And we couldn't get it done because we had to get them through nominations and no one would vote for the guy. um so you you you know if you want an actual uh opportunity to get the the candidates in because once they're a candidate once they've won then they're going to be the candidate forever so this is a great opportunity to uh to bypass the electoral process the internal party machinations to come up with some sort of uh candidates that you really want to have the the snap election is a a

Carter 34:07

wonderful tool to get past some of these bogus internal processes so

Corey 34:12

so listen there's actually as we talk this out i want to make clear there's there's basically two types of oh my god we need a candidate situations here one is we've got a good writing and need a candidate and the other is we've got a bad writing and need a candidate yeah

Corey 34:25

and carter's entirely right if you're the leader and you've got a like a gem of a writing and there's there's not really a contest that's going on and you can just drop somebody in out of expediency that's that's great you can you can coax some pretty star people off of the sidelines in a situation like that because you know there's a lot of people have jobs where if they want to be the candidate they have to quit the job there's no guarantee they're going to win they're just not willing to take that plunge but if you're offering them a safe seat and they get appointed and

Corey 34:52

and there's kind of a pretext for it so their entire riding association won't hate them well that's fantastic absolutely do that on the other side there's the ridings like let's just think about basically every rural prairie riding and the liberals trying to find a candidate there.

Corey 35:07

Well, you don't necessarily need to live in the riding. You're running. It usually helps just even to get the signatures to literally get on the ballot. But that's why you have party apparatuses. And then there are in those areas often what we would term perennial candidates, people who just really like running and holding up the standard in those situations for any number of reasons. Maybe it makes them feel very important for a bit. If you're a past candidate, you get certain voting rights within political parties usually um

Corey 35:33

um maybe it's something that you're happy to do as like a you know you own a small law firm and you want to be a judge someday and you know that's just it's crass but it's how it sort of works and

Corey 35:44

uh and that's um you know that's a different type of candidate as well and parties know

Corey 35:49

know how to fill their dead writings like that they've got they've got plans a b c and d for those situations and they can all be operationalized in very little time you know In both situations, you

Corey 36:01

you don't need two months to fill your writings. Just think about how we used to have elections on more of a drop of a hat. The reality is you get

Corey 36:09

get ready when you got to get ready.

Carter 36:10

Staff's mothers were like a standard go-to. I'll just call my mom and see if she's willing to run in northern Alberta. There's a huge history of staff's mothers running in northern Alberta.

SPEAKER_02 36:23

That's really interesting. Okay, we're going to leave that segment there and move it on to our next segment, the strategy session guys oh fuck i'm not gonna make you i'm not gonna i'm not gonna make it easy on you so loud i'm not gonna be trump

Carter 36:34

trump again is it once again

SPEAKER_02 36:37

just to remind you guys this is not the strategy scale although i am blending some elements in it because i do want to hear some of your comments on a few of these things not just get your your strategic uh take and messaging on it but the the concept here is very simple i go through a list of items that are in the news, some of which are strategic moves made by political parties or political leaders or comments made by them. And I ask you twofold questions. The first one is what you would have said instead or what you would say in response. And then once I get both of that from you guys, I want to have a discussion on the item at hand and kind of see where you are going. Carter, there's no easier way to get this going than to just start as we usually do. uh and and i want to start with you uh because you're better at this i just have to say you're better yeah

Carter 37:24

yeah i mean that's 100 i pay attention i uh yeah

Carter 37:29

you know what's again one

Corey 37:29

one of these days we're just gonna run you through some of these uh oh i would be fucking

SPEAKER_02 37:34

i would i would have tech

Corey 37:36

i would have tech

SPEAKER_02 37:37

tech issues as the

SPEAKER_02 37:39

the podcast would uh would end which is one of the benefits of recording during a pandemic stephen carter joe biden is going to reject keystone uh we're hearing that he's going to do it on the first day of his presidency on, I guess, on Wednesday, right? Wednesday or Thursday, day one. It's a day one item. The news reports have come out.

SPEAKER_02 37:58

If you're Justin Trudeau, what are you saying?

Carter 38:01

If I'm Justin Trudeau, I'm saying, thank God I bought that Trans Mountain pipeline. Right now, Trans Mountain is the only thing between Alberta and about $4 billion of lost royalties. So he should be being thanked right now for seeing the opportunity of that pipeline and investing in it and understanding that the federal government owning it would have been 10 times better than the Alberta government owning it in terms of getting it across and actually getting it built. And he's been committed to getting it built for us. So right now, I'd be – if I was Justin Trudeau, before the election when I get distracted, I might take a victory tour through Calgary and Edmonton just to – mostly just to see the look on Jason Kenney's face when he has to deal with the fact that this – you know, Jason – this is it, Jason. This is the last person that's standing between Alberta and economic ruin.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

Okay, Carter, I'm going to give you more specific instructions because I don't know if I did that well enough. enough you're justin

Carter 39:03

justin trudeau listen you're

SPEAKER_02 39:05

you're standing in front uh you don't care okay well oh no

Carter 39:07

no i'm gonna listen i gotta listen this time okay

SPEAKER_02 39:09

okay okay you're gonna have to listen i told i told i literally told everyone you're better at this yeah yeah you've

Carter 39:13

you've set a good bar for me yeah jesus i got excited i got excited by that i

SPEAKER_02 39:17

i thought you knew what this was see this is the issue you don't you don't listen good strategy yeah uh you're justin trudeau you're front of you're front of a press pool of reporters i'm understanding this happened this happens on on Wednesday. You were asked by a reporter. So President Biden has done this. What is your response? What are you saying? If you are Justin Trudeau? I'm talking about messaging here. And so this is where we go into rapid messaging. What is your rapidly innovated message right now that you're saying into that mic? Once they tell you that this has happened? What would you want to say to the President of the United States? Or what do you want to say to Canada about this? You're Justin Trudeau. What are you coaching him to say? What are the words?

Carter 39:58

my government has been committed to

Carter 40:02

developing renewable energy across the country and making Canada a renewable energy powerhouse because that's what we need now. We can't be just a fossil fuels powerhouse. We have to be an energy powerhouse, and thank goodness that my government has been doing that. So you're

Carter 40:20

you're welcome, Canada. I don't know.

Carter 40:23

what is Justin Trudeau saying? Corey is going to be way better than me now. i

Carter 40:26

liked my first answer fuck you jason kenney was my first answer it

SPEAKER_02 40:30

it was pretty good i doubt that's what he would say cory yeah you know your answer

Corey 40:33

answer is hot garbage all around first answer second answer all answers bad uh

Corey 40:39

uh i would say well uh i am uh i'm surprised and i'm disappointed that the new president has decided to pull the presidential permit for keystone xl this is of of course, something that happened under the Biden administration or sorry, the Obama administration in 2015. But that was prior to Canada's world leading climate action plan. That was prior to all of the activity we've taken here. And Canada is able to meet our Paris targets while still building the KXL pipeline. It also makes us more secure. It makes the continent stronger. It pulls allies together. Frankly, I would have hoped that President Biden would have wanted to turn a page in Canada-U.S. relationships and had this conversation with us, but he has pulled the permit for now. I do not see this as a concluded issue. I look forward to talking to the president about bringing back this permit once he better understands all of the actions Canada has taken, all of the support it has from Indigenous populations along the pipeline route, not to mention the support of every governor along the route. So this is to be continued, not to be concluded. And we look forward to ensuring Canada's continued economic prosperity. We will always fight for canadian interests we will always fight for the interests of the oil and gas industry well

Carter 41:53

well that's one way of doing it cory

Corey 41:59

cory meanwhile he'll be thinking oh

Corey 42:02

oh fuck you jason getty

SPEAKER_02 42:05

so uh cory i'm gonna i'm gonna uh spare you the 15 seconds of prep time that you had prior to this answer and i'm gonna go back to you on this so carter you get the 15 seconds. What is Aaron O'Toole saying? He's doing his own press conference. He has a mic put in front of him. He has this news told to him. Of course, you'll know it. But what is his comment that he's telling Canadian reporters about Keystone XL and the Biden administration?

Corey 42:33

Biden administration made this decision because the Trudeau administration simply has He has no pull with the U.S. government because he has lost ethical and principled leadership, that foundation on which all good partnerships are made. Without ethical and principled leadership in Ottawa, we can't expect our trading partners to meet us at the table and come to the accords that we need them to come to. Now, the other thing this does, of course, is it lays bare that the Trudeau climate plan, such as it is, is nothing except a wealth transfer. It's not actually improving the environment. President Biden knows that. That's exactly why he is not supporting KXL under these parameters. Under an O'Toole government, not only would everyday Canadians not be hit by this carbon tax, but also we would have real climate action that is dictated in a way that doesn't hurt our economy, but we'll still get the support and respect of our allies, such as President Biden, who will deal with us because of our ethical and principled leadership. Did I mention how ethical and principled we are relative to the Trudeau government? from it nicely

SPEAKER_02 43:35

nicely done that was one of my favorite moments on the podcast cory going back to back unwinding his words from one to another stephen carter uh what would you say if you're aaron o'toole fuck

Carter 43:48

fuck you joe biden okay

SPEAKER_02 43:52

if you just give it up it's

Corey 43:54

it's good what our audience doesn't know is how much of a leg there is between like uh carter's like

Corey 44:00

like visuals and his audio oh yeah it's It's just his

SPEAKER_02 44:04

his lips are still

Corey 44:05

still moving. So you see him shouting.

Corey 44:07

You see him shouting. And then about three seconds later.

Carter 44:11

I think that it's just going to be – I mean it's hard to – I'd have to take pieces of Corey's very windy argument because it was very lengthy and it just kept going. But basically, he's going to say, you know, we're paying the price for climate leadership so we can have the benefits of a carbon of the last days of our carbon, our carbon based economy. But Trudeau's is pissing that away, too. We don't get the benefit of we're paying extra and getting less. And I don't understand why we have to pay extra to get less because I'm a conservative.

Corey 44:46

Yeah, Carter, I'm sorry I didn't get to the pith of it in the two seconds I had to come up with it. No,

Carter 44:51

No, it's okay. I mean, I'm just better at this. I'm just better, is what I'm saying.

SPEAKER_02 44:55

I apologize for our listeners.

SPEAKER_02 45:01

Carter, I'm going to give you another shot at it first here. Let's move to Aaron O'Toole, what he said, and I want a Trudeau response to this one. So Aaron O'Toole put out a press release earlier, I believe this weekend. Maybe even today

SPEAKER_02 45:14

Sunday, maybe yesterday or today, just to ultimately a long missive about how he's not a alt-right conservative trying to distance himself from the Trumpers within his party. The key phrase within it said that the conservatives are a moderate, pragmatic, mainstream party as old as Confederation that sits squarely in the center of Canadian politics, unquote. At that same press conference I mentioned to you earlier, Justin Trudeau has a question, of course, about what Biden did on Keystone XL. Then the next question is by another reporter saying, did you read this thing by Aaron O'Toole about his party, about the conservatives being a pragmatic,

SPEAKER_02 45:55

pragmatic, centrist party? What do you say if you're Justin Trudeau?

Carter 45:59

Well, I would say the following. following um my

Carter 46:03

my father told me to judge people not by what they say but by what they do and

Carter 46:09

i hear the words that mr o'toole is saying and it makes me think that he wants to be one thing but

Carter 46:14

but i'm what i'm actually seeing him do is put leslin lewis derrick sloan pierre pauliev michelle rempergarner and candace bergen in

Carter 46:25

in the window of his conservative party and

Carter 46:28

say this is is who the Conservative Party is. And that's the signal that he's sending to all Canadians. So if

Carter 46:34

if you want to say that you're the centre of Canadian politics, Mr. O'Toole, Canadians know better than to listen to your words when they can see your actions. And the actions tell us that you are not in the centre. You are to the right and you are to the far right.

SPEAKER_02 46:50

Nicely done. Stephen Carter with a comeback here. Corey, your thoughts on what Trudeau would... By the way, your laugh I can hear now, but I can – it's very strange.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

By the way, he should never say

Carter 47:00

say that. I just really wanted to do it, but he should never, ever say that. He shouldn't take the question.

SPEAKER_02 47:05

When I say making a comeback, I mean stitching coherent words together. Corey, we haven't even assessed whether it's good strategy just yet.

Corey 47:15

You really lost interest

SPEAKER_02 47:17

in the first part of that. Should we just end the episode now? No, no, keep going. Push through. Push through. We're doing good. Either you're fundamentally distracted or disinterested, probably both. So, Corey, what should Justin Trudeau say at that same press conference when he gets a question about O'Toole's press release? Stevens

Corey 47:31

Stevens was excellent. I'll take it and I'll maybe put a tiny bit of a different spin on it there. You know, Aaron O'Toole's statement was great if you ignore absolutely everything that he's done. It's not just a question of who he's appointed. So one of two things has happened here. Either

Corey 47:46

Either he's being disingenuous and this is not who he is because clearly his actions have not reflected this. Or this is who he is, but he's not in control of his conservative party, because certainly even if you look at things like them talking about, you know, using far right American messages around election fraud or far right American suggestions like people with criminal records shouldn't get vaccines. scenes side note here i know it was actually talking about con you know people in prison but hey this is

Corey 48:14

is how you would frame it right and um and

Corey 48:17

and i would just continue to repeat this notion of far right zane and uh and i would say which is it is aaron o'toole lying to you or is aaron o'toole out of control of his party nicely

SPEAKER_02 48:27

nicely done let's take off the messaging hat for a second i want to have a discussion on this particular one because i want to get both your takes as to how big of a deal it is that that o'toole put this out like do you feel like this was good strategy on his part? And Carter, maybe I'll start with you. And why do you think he did it? And I'm just going to get your normal take now, non-messaging take.

Carter 48:46

Yeah, it's the worst strategy in the world. I don't understand why you would do it. I mean, honest to God, when you're carving out a position for yourself in the zeitgeist,

Carter 48:55

zeitgeist, in the political zeitgeist, when you're trying to define who you are, you don't use your words to define who you are. You show through your actions, right? We We call it the kind of the brand experience in marketing. What is the brand experience? And so if you're going to have a brand experience that is to the center of Canadian politics, then put out people who represent the center of Canadian politics. Don't send out people who don't. That is the biggest kind of fake news. I mean, you can't just say these things. You have to show us. The electorate is barely paying attention at the best of times, and they need to see things. They can't just hear a written statement, you know, 250 words on how centrist you are. That's just not going to play, not going to play at all. And I think it's just evidence that the far right, the toxic nature of the far right emanating from the U.S., but also Boris Johnson's far right and the Brexit movement or the far right of Europe, Europe, these far-right parties are becoming less and less tolerable as we're seeing them up close. And Canada didn't go to the far right the way that some other major democracies have, but we're still learning from their experience. And it would appear that we don't like it. So O'Toole has all kinds of opportunity to prove that he's not that, and it doesn't come from a statement.

SPEAKER_02 50:23

Corey, what do you think of this strategy by O'Toole putting out this press release on a Sunday, trying to dismiss claims that he's got Trumpers within his party? What do you make of both the strategy and perhaps even the messaging of what he's done here?

Corey 50:37

The strategy is, it

Corey 50:39

it seems a little defensive to me, given the timing with the US, the swearing in and everything going on there. And that gives me a bit of a head scratching moment. But I want want to take the opposite position from carter here i disagree with him i might even 100 disagree with him uh he said you know carter said you can't just say these things well yeah you absolutely can because as you yourself said steven the electorate is barely paying attention and the difference between now and say 30 years ago um is they can just go straight to the statement unfiltered by the media they can take that as their facts the thing is uh both sides have done a very good job of laying out cases for and against and if you're a conservative supporter or even just want to be a conservative supporter and you feel like you know vibe wise that's where you want to be you can just point to it and say yeah i know this is just liberal fear and smear i mean look at the words of aaron o'toole himself he has said he's a moderate he has said that he you know supports right to abortion he's his very first statement with like literally this is an argument for conservatives to have with people who say aaron o'toole is too far right and and he has given it to them in a very digestible format here so you know i think there was a certain genius to it um i you know what the words i gave to trudeau i i think are sort of mine too i would say

Corey 51:55

is this really who he is or is he not in control of his party or is this a way for him to attempt to assert control of his party so that's the other component of it here this is him saying this is what the conservative party is and i'm sure it will have a reaction uh from people who who believe the Conservative Party should be otherwise. But here we have a statement of intent. It's a statement of intent, both internal and external. And it's pretty bold when you get right down to it. Is it going to work? I don't know. But I disagree with the notion that he has to show through his actions because I just don't think that's how the political discourse goes these days. I think if you go to Fox News right now, you're going to see an awful lot of people pointing to things Donald Trump said that are not backed up by his actions. the dude still got 40 approval or you know depends on the pool maybe maybe 36 but still you know the reality is what they want it to be and aaron o'toole putting something like this out there makes that a little bit easier this is the

Carter 52:50

the fundamental the fundamental problem is that aaron o'toole doesn't want to be the trump guy he can't if he wants to be trump guy then sure put out as many false statements as you want don't worry about how what people see rely on them to to believe the falsehood if that's what your election strategy is then then O'Toole's on it, like he's got it down. But if his election strategy is go to Fox News and compare us to that,

Carter 53:14

you know, he's really going to struggle in the next election, then Trudeau can call the election whenever the hell he wants, because he's going to win.

Corey 53:21

Yeah, I don't know. I think you're looking at it a little too simplistically here. And I really do think that the lesson of Donald Trump that every politician should learn, and I believe Aaron O'Toole has shown he at least somewhat understands through this statement is, you don't need to be be intermediated. You can write exactly what you want people to think of you and your diehards will carry it. They will carry it to the ends of the earth. And now we have a statement that effectively does that.

SPEAKER_02 53:46

Corey, I'm going to move it on to our next item here on the strategy session. Public Services and Procurement Minister Anita Anand said this week that the global pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will temporarily delay shipments of its vaccine to Canada, further complicating the slow rollout of doses. I want you to be Justin Trudeau. I don't want you to be Aaron O'Toole. I want you to be Justin Trudeau at that same aforementioned press conference. Give me the words that he should say when a reporter says, is this concerning? What do you think this means to Canada? The opposition has said that this actually further showcases Canada's inability to distribute and procure these vaccines properly. What would you be saying if you're Justin Trudeau at that podium?

Corey 54:28

Not at all. Not concerned at all. Our rollout plan was always based on the idea that things do not go perfectly. It's why Canada has purchased 10 times as many vaccines as we have citizens. It's why we have plans A, plans B, plans C. This will not affect timelines in any fashion whatsoever, and there is nothing to be concerned about whatsoever. The prudence that we brought into this will serve us well through this moment, and Canadians have nothing to worry about. Carter,

SPEAKER_02 54:57

Carter, same question to you. Trudeau, in front of a mic, what is he saying about the delay in shipments for the vaccine?

Carter 55:04

It's disappointing to be sure, but we'd planned for setbacks. We planned to have, you know, up to nine vaccinations for every Canadian citizen. And the reason we did so is that we knew that it wasn't going to work perfectly. We knew that it wasn't going to happen the way that necessarily we drew it up in the first instance. And I'm pleased that we're still getting 50 percent of our allotment. The United States is getting 0% of their allotment. And this is part of our planning structures and our ability to purchase it early. This means that we're performing better than many other countries around the world. And we're pleased to be able to provide our provincial partners with the vaccinations that they require.

SPEAKER_02 55:42

Let's take the messenger hat off for a second. Guys, how big of a deal is this for the Trudeau government? Is this just a hiccup? Is this something that could be emblematic of their success on the rollout? I mean, the data we have is the data we have, but what do you kind of make of the political consequences here? Corey, I'll start with you.

Corey 56:00

This is not a problem. If this follows with additional delays and all of a sudden we are waiting for many months beyond our peer country group, then yeah, then it's a huge problem. So I wouldn't sweat it, but if

Corey 56:17

if there's further delays, then I think that people are going to start saying what the hell's happening.

SPEAKER_02 56:22

Carter, what do you think?

Carter 56:22

Yeah, one vaccine for one month is relatively

Carter 56:29

Two, three, four vaccines, like all the different vaccines that have been bet on to provide significant numbers to Canadians. If they all start falling through, then we're going to see

Carter 56:40

see a bit of an uprising. And that's why that's my one hedge about the spring election is that more than one thing can go wrong. If you start to see a problem with one vaccine, chances are that other vaccines may need to take similar steps.

Corey 56:59

It's a big world and we're a small part of it. So, you know, very much could happen.

SPEAKER_02 57:04

I'm going to move it on to our next one and we're going to come back to our home province here in Alberta. I should say come to. We haven't we've not touched Alberta just yet, but we will. And we're going to get you to play the role of Jason Kenney and Stephen Carter. I'm going to start with you first. you're playing Jason Kenney in this press conference and in this particular case it's about the rumblings of so many things to choose from but I'm going to choose this the Steve Allen report coming out on the 31st mired with delays a report that uh and you could probably even contextualize it for us Carter what the the thesis of the report was supposed to be because fuck it's changed so many times um so before you jump into your responses Kenny give us a little bit of context for our listeners outside of Alberta um and even for the ones in Because it's been delayed so many times that I think people have forgotten about it. So this report that's supposed to be written, how are you expectation setting if you are Jason Kenney leading into this report should be released in the next 10 days or so? Well,

Carter 57:58

Well, the context is that, you know, the thesis is that foreign money came in to Alberta to shut down the pipeline production and pipeline construction. And in fact, you know, we're seeing the end of that now with the Biden administration shutting down Keystone XL. There was money piped in into the North American market that wasn't piped into other markets to try and stop pipeline construction. You know, it didn't get deployed into the U.S. either. It was mostly focused on Canada and to constrain our development of our resources in Alberta.

Carter 58:36

So that's the general thesis. And the idea is that money came in to

Carter 58:42

nonprofit associations in Canada that then paid for anti-pipeline messaging, and that money was primarily from foreign accounts. So, you know, that that that's the base premise. The challenge with it is that it implies that there was something nefarious about that, that somehow this foreign money coming in was

Carter 59:03

was saying things that weren't true, or that were propping up arguments that weren't were were in some fashion false, or, you know, and what we're finding and this this inquiry was supposed to get to the bottom of it, right, to find out why the money came and why it was also false. So Jason Kenney invested, I think it was $2.5 million to start, and then it became $3.5, but it could have been $3.5 to start and then went to $4.5. Anyways, it's under $5 million, but it's still a significant amount of money into this gentleman, Steve Allen, who was one of Calgary's shining lights, if you will. And he was going to do this investigation to find out what was true or what's not true. what's interesting now is we're coming to find out that some of the big players like greenpeace uh uh what haven't even really been spoken to so getting

Carter 59:51

getting a really good sense of what the steve allen report is going to say has been tricky because we're not really sure what he's what he's looked into and when you look at it at the website and some of the prep prep materials holy shit like we are talking way

Carter 1:00:07

way out there conspiracy like the idea that there was you You know, people talking about our pipelines and attacking us for ideas that were wrong. I mean, these papers undermine the whole idea that, like, fossil fuels have anything to do with global warming. Like, really

Carter 1:00:25

really amazing stuff. And so if I'm to put my cap on and then say, you know, I'm Jason Kenney and I'm going to stand up and defend this report or, you

Carter 1:00:35

you know, set the table for this report. honest to god zane based on what i've seen to this point jason kenney should do what he did with the war room and minimize minimize minimize minimize expectations this paper is not going to shift things we had one of these we

Carter 1:00:49

we had one of these when i was chief of staff we set a whole bunch of expectations on a on a on

Carter 1:00:54

on some sort of report that was going to be generated for us we only spent a couple hundred grand on it so it was nothing comparatively and

Carter 1:01:00

and then the report came in it looked like it was written by my grade eight daughter at the time right like it was not a good report. And we just buried it. Unfortunately, the Steve Allen report is not going to be able to be buried. It's going to be out there. So very difficult for me after doing that preamble to stand as Jason Kenney and say how this thing's going to work. Don't

SPEAKER_02 1:01:19

Don't worry, that's why we have Corey here. Corey, you are our de facto Jason Kenney for this. The question comes from a reporter. We hear now that there's not going to be a third delay. This is going to be issued in the coming days. Mr. Premier, what should we be expecting from this report?

Corey 1:01:34

Oh, this report will, I suspect, give us additional insight into what all Albertans already know, which is that the oil and gas industry, which has provided such

Corey 1:01:44

such great livelihoods and increased the standard of living, not just here, but across the world. And let me be clear, it has also improved the standard of living in third world nations, in places like India, in places like China, because it has lifted people out of poverty. And this industry is under assault at this point. And all Albertans know it. And I suspect this will just be one of many summaries that are available just highlighting how bad this problem has become under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who's been no friend of Alberta and has allowed this problem to get so wildly out of hand. Now, it's just one of many summaries of this problem. Let

Corey 1:02:21

Let me be clear. This government will stand up against all opponents of the livelihoods of good, honest, hardworking and Albertans. And we will always fight for Alberta. And we will always make sure that we hold Ottawa to account.

Carter 1:02:36

I'm a little disappointed there was no reference to folks in that statement. You know, I think you missed your opportunity. That's a follow

Corey 1:02:45

You know what? I thought it was lazy enough with the let me be clear.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:50

Take the messenger hat off for a second. Guys, how big of a problem is this for Trudeau? Oh,

Corey 1:02:54

Oh, listen, I actually don't know it's a huge huge problem. It's the kind of thing that people who already don't like Jason Kenney will talk about forever. And I suspect it's going to be embarrassing because we have a good sense of the ingredients. It's like if you walk into a kitchen and it's just all, it's like, oh, you've got capers and you've got raisins and you've got vinegar and that's it. And you're making me a meal.

Corey 1:03:18

It's going to be awesome.

Corey 1:03:19

So we know this is going to be a bad, how could it not be a bad report let me read to you some of the content participants were asked to comment on this is not a joke this is not you've

Carter 1:03:29

you've got to read i'm glad you've got it please mines

Corey 1:03:31

mines minerals and green energy green in quotes a reality check false

Corey 1:03:35

false alarm how climate change cost us trillions hurts the poor and fails to fix the climate apocalypse

Corey 1:03:41

apocalypse never why environmental alarmism hurts us all it

Corey 1:03:45

it goes on a world-class environment that one's boring uh

Corey 1:03:50

yeah it's just like it's It's crazy like and there's a lot of stuff and then of course last week one of the big things where there were some reports that were heavy with client or climate denialism like there's no problem at all here and

Corey 1:04:02

and it resulted in Commissioner Allen saying but I'm

Corey 1:04:05

I'm not going to talk about the science at all in this report. So like he's talked a lot about what's not in this report and at this point I'm just not sure what is but there's no way based on the inputs that this output is going to be in any way satisfactory for anybody out

SPEAKER_02 1:04:21

Carter, finish us off here on this segment. How big of a deal is this for Kenny? Like, is this report, could it be long-term damaging, or is it just a short-term showcase of incompetence around this government, around this particular file?

Carter 1:04:38

Well, I think that if he was in a normal situation where he was riding high at, let's say, 55, 60% approval, this would be an annoyance. It'd be like the equivalent of a fly buzzing around, it's just annoying. He'd release the report. The report would be accepted

Carter 1:04:54

accepted and then kind of ignored. Keep in mind that the minister has up to six months before she has to release it to the general public. So she can still wait for

Carter 1:05:04

for a less public moment to release this thing, and I suspect that that's what they will do. He's so down in the polls, he's so negatively viewed right now, Now, this is just going to be another moment where he's viewed negatively. And that's where the challenge

Carter 1:05:25

challenge for him lies, is that it doesn't really matter what it is. It's just going to add to his existing brand problem.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:33

We're going to leave that segment there and move it on to our final segment over under a lightning round. Guys, are you ready?

Carter 1:05:40

Yeah, of course. Oh, very much so. Always ready. Always ready to help. Of course you're not ready for it.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:45

Carter, thank you so much. But your enthusiasm is what I usually say makes you better at this. And then things go where they go. Carter, over, under, on seven.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:54

Over, under, on seven. The political harm, I'm sick here with Alberta, for Jason Kenney and the UCB government's decision to allow open pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains. It's an item that's getting a lot of heat over the course of the last couple of days. But the political sort of hit that this could mean to Kenny over under on seven with 10 being maximum, one being, you know, negligible and he could ignore.

Carter 1:06:18

I mean, I think that this is one of the things that's got your base. So I'm going to have to go with over because, you know, this is your rural base that believes in you. And all of a sudden they are now pissed with you. And this

Carter 1:06:32

this is not good for him. You know, first the parks thing was something that, you know, he was going to delist and sell some parks and he had to kind of back away from that while at the same time saying it was never on the table. And now he's been kind of found out for the coal mining expansion. And what kills you about that is, you know, what he sold the leases for. I mean, you

Carter 1:06:51

you know, coal mining in general delivers so little in the way of royalties or in real value to the province. you'd really wonder why you'd do it at all if you're not powering your province based on coal fire power. So this is a really bad deal for Alberta. And it's been picked up now by Kenny's base, and it's going to be hurting.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:13

Corey, over on round seven on this particular decision by Kenny and the UCP government to allow open pit coal mining in the Rocky Mountains, the political harm. Oh,

Corey 1:07:21

Oh, I think over. I think this is very big. For our non-Alberta listeners, what you need to know is there was a fracas about the delisting of a few parks in alberta uh that resulted in a

Corey 1:07:33

campaign that had election style signs on people's lawn they were all over the place i

Corey 1:07:38

what people i think outside of alberta somewhat fail to appreciate about alberta is even conservatives are like small e environmentalists they may you know have weird climate views in some cases but the reality is i mean this is big sky beautiful rocky mountains a place so beautiful i always tell people they literally created the national park system for it banff is the first national park and and we love we love our outdoors and and the idea of strip mining in the mountains is or the foothills is just it's abhorrent and uh coal

Corey 1:08:10

coal is the energy source that oil and gas looks down on you've got to keep in mind it's even been governor of alberta messaging even under premier kenny that hey oil and gas is good because it gets people off coal and coal is the thing that really fucking sucks and the notion that we are now going to be you

Corey 1:08:26

know strip mining and supporting the coal industry in alberta is just it's so bloody dystopian and i think if you needed an example if you were the ndp and you needed an example to hit people over the head of like this government wants to take us backward and we want to go forward i mean it

Corey 1:08:43

was it was oil and gas seemed to be a relevant enough example right just really tied to oil and gas but to go To go even further, to go to coal, to

Corey 1:08:52

to go to coal. I mean, coal is something that we should have all been getting off of ages ago. And it's so emblematic. And I am waiting for the lawn signs that are about coal in my neighborhood.

Corey 1:09:05

waiting for this big cause to begin. We're

SPEAKER_02 1:09:08

We're already seeing the Save Our Mountains moniker appear online and, you know, a parallel to Defend Our Parks, which is the campaign that you were referring to, Corey, about the provincial parks. I

Corey 1:09:19

I just think that the UCP's position here is exceptionally

Corey 1:09:22

exceptionally indefensible. I don't know that there's a natural constituency for it. And ultimately, that is a very dangerous place to be as a government. We

SPEAKER_02 1:09:34

We will go from that question, cool the temperatures a bit, to a question where I think I can assume the answer already. Corey, I'm going to start with you first. On the elation scale, how elated do you feel on a scale of 1 to 10, the NRA is filing for bankruptcy? On a scale of 1 to 10, the level of elation, that makes you feel?

Corey 1:09:51

Yeah, it's 2 because they're just going to restructure. Now, it'll be interesting because there was a lot of war of words. What's happening is they're declaring bankruptcy. They're currently incorporated in new york i can't remember what they called their plans like flight to freedom or something like that they want to reincorporate in texas where they won't be sued to oblivion by the ag i think is the presumption their actual headquarters is in virginia anyways i don't know that it's going to change much about their day-to-day operations it's really interesting read the suggestion that the executives at the nri essentially just pilfered the organization totally

Corey 1:10:24

there may be kind of legal consequences but i

Corey 1:10:27

i can't be that elated because Because I feel like at the end of the day, there's still going to be an NRA, and that's still a pretty dark world, because what a shitty organization.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:37

You know, Carter, I give Corey the chance for an easy layup, so just we can celebrate even momentarily. And what he does, he lectures us on reincorporation. Just remind me this moment, just to never invite him to a party. Carter, give me the obvious answer here. Are you going to also be a dick about this, or are you going to be naturally elated at a 10, as you should be?

Carter 1:10:59

I'm elated, but I share Corey's concerns about the flight to Texas. But I will give you a podcast to listen to, not ours, but Gangster Capitalism Season 2 is looking at the collapse of the NRA, and it was really, really fun. It's a few months old now, but the

Carter 1:11:18

stuff they tried to get away with was amazing, and I hope that they all go to jail. Because I think there may still be an NRA based in Texas, but I think that there's going to be some people who work for the NRA who are going to be in jail in New York.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:32

Carter, I'm going to go to you on this one to start off with. The federal government has chosen not to exercise, news report coming out, chose not to exercise an option to buy 16 million more doses of the Moderna vaccine. This was earlier when the procurement minister said we've got more than enough. With the slowdown that they now have on the Pfizer vaccine, on a scale of 1 to 10, the political damage this could potentially cause to the Trudeau government what do you think well

Carter 1:11:56

well i mean everything can be damaging it could be a it could be a 10 um it depends you know the point of the exercise was to uh have have multiple eggs in multiple baskets um so shutting down one of those baskets or making them smaller uh could come back and bite you in the tushy um so tushy is the word of the day oh

SPEAKER_02 1:12:18

we don't do that okay cory Corey, was the inappropriateness of the slum talk up front not enough for either of you? Corey, same question to you. One to ten, the political damage this might do to the Trudeau government, them rejecting additional doses of the Moderna vaccine.

Corey 1:12:40

That it might do? I mean, it might be a ten. It might be a one. I guess it could be a ten for sure. Carter is right. Like, let's just say there's a 99% confidence there's no need for this vaccine. Well, I would

Corey 1:12:54

would probably still buy it if I was the government of Canada. This

Carter 1:12:56

This is something you

Corey 1:12:57

you could then reroute to other nations that are having trouble with vaccines down the road. Think of it almost as purchasing an option. And just

Corey 1:13:05

just the potential downside is just too high. If people say you had the chance to get this and you didn't do it, this is an approved vaccine. seen. This is something that could potentially alleviate some concerns here. I think

Corey 1:13:19

think they're probably fine. I suspect that the people in Health Canada very reasonably said we have enough vaccines, we're good. But yeah,

Corey 1:13:29

yeah, I mean, the potential downside is just too high. I think I would have covered myself.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:34

Corey, I'm going to stick with you on this next one. Over under on six, the political heartache slash worry for Trudeau that Biden's going to be canceling the Keystone XL permit?

Corey 1:13:45

I think it's under.

Corey 1:13:47

It's a bit of kabuki theater right now. And I'm not even saying that Justin Trudeau doesn't want KXL. I think he very much wants KXL. I think he wants Alberta to be economically successful. I think he's managed to convince himself that this legitimately is a big part of Canada's climate plan is that we make these big decisions

Corey 1:14:06

decisions on these infrastructure pieces and we take other actions that offset and this is how we sustain our economy while we green our green our society but um they

Corey 1:14:18

they don't need need kxl as long as transmountain comes online as as long as other options come to fruition and especially given what's happening in the oil sands right now it's quite possible if every pipeline that was under under consideration got built, that we would have too much pipeline capacity in the province of Alberta. Now, that will be seen as sacrilege in the province of Alberta. But I just I don't know that, that if I'm sitting there in Ottawa, where I already have Alberta written off, and my Department of Finance is saying, Alberta needs two out of three pipelines, they're going to get two out of three still, without KXL, that I'm that that worried about it.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:59

Carter, same question to you over on round six for Trudeau, the heartache that Biden and cancelling the KeyXL permit will mean for him.

Carter 1:15:05

Well, Trudeau picked up the phone. He called his Alberta caucus. He got them all together. He asked them what they thought. No one was on the phone. So he just said, fuck it. So it's under. I mean, there's no seats at stake. This isn't going to change his government. I honestly do think that he wishes the best for Alberta because that is, in fact, the best for Canada. But Corey's not wrong. I mean, when we get TMX online. And Line 3

Corey 1:15:30

3 is the other one.

Carter 1:15:30

one. Yeah, and getting something to

Carter 1:15:33

to the world market that may improve our pricing structure. I think that that's really all we can hope for.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:41

Okay, so to our friends who are wondering, you know, we're in the last question of the over, under, and lightning round. We've talked about America zero in this episode. If you want to listen to all of our American stuff in a massive week for America, listen to our You the People episode, which we recorded on Thursday. But Carter, I'm going to finish off, and this is a repeat question from You the People, Just to give you another chance at it, Stephen Carter, to you first. Before Wednesday, does Donald Trump self-pardon himself? Pardon? Self-pardon himself? Does Donald Trump issue a pardon for himself?

Carter 1:16:11

I'm going to be consistent. He will not pardon himself because he has been told that that will open him to civil litigation.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:18

Corey, same question to you. Knowing what Stephen has said.

Corey 1:16:22

Yeah, I think I'm the guy who told Stephen that, so I agree he's not going to pardon himself. You

Carter 1:16:25

You did not tell me that. Jesus Christ.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:31

Yeah, we're good. Got it out of your system? Yeah, I think so.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:34

Okay, great. We're going to leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 908 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velgey. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.

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