Transcript
Zain
0:01
This is The Strategist, episode 919. My name is Zain Velji, with me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, what is going on?
Carter
0:11
I'm recording the podcast standing up this time. It's great. I got more movement, more motion.
Corey
0:17
You're standing up. Zain was outdoors earlier today. It's a really exciting time. Let me
Zain
0:22
me tell you something. I was outdoors and it fucking sucked. I don't understand. I don't understand why at all, ever. I had to be there. But there was people leisurely walking and I said, why? Just are you lost?
Zain
0:38
I didn't understand. Do you need help
Corey
0:40
help finding your homes or vehicles?
Zain
0:41
vehicles? Yeah, yeah. It seemed like they did. It seemed like they did. Carter,
Zain
0:46
Carter, what's going on with you?
Carter
0:48
well you know just trying to get through the day really struggling to get through the day just like everybody else during this pandemic you know not interested in sports almost became interested in sports just to have a hobby just which sport which sport almost
Zain
1:01
almost hooked you um
Carter
1:03
um hockey maybe okay fuck cory
Zain
1:05
cory what's going on with your life just i go to you there's nothing there i can't build off of anything you know none of the movie references you had no idea who bill bell dave dave i
Carter
1:18
gotta fish this big oh
Zain
1:21
oh my god cory i'm
Carter
1:23
i'm gonna eat some cake do
Zain
1:24
do i yeah how
Carter
1:26
you doing i'm struggling to
Corey
1:31
on the rails do you want to talk to a human being who knows pop culture references or uh you know sports or or anything besides the cake that he's eating and the outdoors what
Zain
1:42
i do want to do is i want to tell one of our twitter followers keith who told me that west jet was owned by a canadian hedge fund and not an american one uh thank you keith maybe you should tell west jet that because i was just reading the copy they gave me so just i don't know like contact customer service keith right
Zain
1:59
right carter is that something you jump on can we go on the
Carter
2:01
the key that's not even his real name he's a total bot it was bullshit yeah
Zain
2:05
cory anything thing you want to add? We've patronized a listener. Carter has filled time by adding no value. We're off to a perfect start so far.
Corey
2:15
I feel like we're matching the energy of the Alberta provincial budget pretty nicely, though. So thematically, I'm on board. We'll
Zain
2:20
We'll be talking about that in a second. But first, the headlines. It is Thursday. We are doing headlines. And I'm going to start us off with CTV News, Quebec Dairy Board, to examine and why Canada's butter is suddenly mysteriously harder. Carter, have you been following Buttergate? Now, what were you laughing at? Hold on, let's just, before you answer my question, what were you laughing at, Carter?
Carter
2:44
can't hear the word harder in a sentence and not laugh. I don't know, I'm a child. What do you want from me?
Zain
2:49
Have you been following Buttergate? I
Carter
2:51
I have been. Anything that gets harder with time, I'm interested in.
Carter
3:00
have been following Buttergate. Can you
Zain
3:03
you fill us in on Buttergate? Can you fill us in on said Buttergate? Not
Carter
3:05
Not really. I mean, what I know from Buttergate.
Corey
3:11
bluff. Not really. What a bluff. Not
Carter
3:13
Not really. It's just unbelievable. No, I mean, apparently cows are eating palm oil and butter's getting harder. And I don't care. I eat butter. I don't care.
Zain
3:23
Now, Buttergate, it is making the headlines across the world. It's in my cake.
Zain
3:27
Yeah, you're a coconut cake. Calgarian, Julie Van Rosendahl, responsible for Buttergate. Corey, do you want to respond to either Buttergate or the headline as you read it for the first time?
Corey
3:38
I think, you know, what's interesting to me about Buttergate is that this all kicked off in a big way during the winter months when I think Canadians would be least likely to be suspicious of butter being harder, right? Yeah, exactly. It's cold. It's hard to tell about these things. In the summer, if it's sitting there and it's a perfect block and it's 30 degrees outside, we might have different feelings about it. So I guess what I'm saying is I think Buttergate is a conspiracy that goes very deep and involves global warming and the mole people and the Rothschilds. So I intend to spend the rest of my week looking into this. I've taken the next couple of days off work, and I'll get back to you next episode. I'll get to the bottom of this for you. No,
Zain
4:15
No, we know the Soros-funded Buttergate is here to stay. listen we started off with the ambition to do a political podcast and we just did a quick two on butter i'm just letting you know we are we are
Zain
4:28
our next headline i'm going to you first for an obvious reason cory because it includes higher ed in a very interesting way this one comes to us from the new york post columbia professor
Zain
4:41
professor says i do heroin regularly for work life balance okay
Zain
4:51
now cory i just want to ask you 10 years
Corey
4:52
years a hell of a thing man i don't know
Zain
4:58
if you if you uh as a as a communicator for university i don't want to put you in a position but if you were having if you were having a webinar let's say a webinar just a light tuesday afternoon webinar yeah
Zain
5:10
one of your professors like a lunchtime webinar webinar that the university hosts and a professor says i do heroin regularly for work-life balance uh would
Zain
5:20
would you be responding to that well
Corey
5:23
i'm wondering what he's doing at work that balances off the heroin use
Zain
5:25
use of life some
Zain
5:29
some universities have a work ethic that's all i wait to say some of them do carter a university professor at columbia doing heroin for work-life balance any thoughts there i
Carter
5:37
i thought hallucinogens were all the thing so i'm a little bit taken aback that we're still with opioids so you know i mean whatever hallucinogen opioids i'm all i'm for all the drugs you guys know this all the drugs i'm a big fan no
Zain
5:50
no i i understand that carter i appreciate that how
Carter
5:53
how do you think i get through this podcast well
Zain
5:56
we knew the cake was one element and and childish innuendo was the other so there
Carter
6:01
there you go everybody
Carter
6:02
everybody listening was on my side everybody listening our
Zain
6:06
our next headline comes to us from the tampa bay times you might be asking zane do you scour the tampa Bay Times. No, what I do is that every Thursday when searching for articles, I type in Florida and see what the fuck happens.
Zain
6:18
one comes to us from the Tampa Bay Times. Florida is better off with a detailed vaccination plan, DeSantis says.
Zain
6:26
The improviser-in-chief, the governor of Florida, DeSantis says that his state is better off without having a detailed vaccination plan or effort, saying that we're approaching this pandemic in ways that other states are not. What other states are getting wrong is that they're planning and planning way too far ahead. Corey, jump in on here.
Corey
6:49
So what he's saying is not entirely
Corey
6:53
Lay it on us. Lay it on us. Yeah, there's all sorts of research that shows, for example, the fastest way to board a plane is just to tell everybody, go get on the plane. Just get on. Right? Fair enough. And
Corey
7:01
And there's a logistical overhead whenever you are trying to segment out groups and you're telling them they have to show up at certain times and they've got to do certain things. And while that may be a faster way to get everybody vaccinated in Florida, it's not going to be a better way because the one problem you're going to have there is that people like me are in no real danger from COVID. You know, at least the danger is pretty remote. And I'm just going to elbow my way to the front of the line. Well, grandma, age 75 with emphysema, is going to be struggling to keep up with me and everybody else who's decided to rush to these things. And that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. So the mistake he's making is assuming that every vaccination is as good as any vaccination, and that is just not the case.
Zain
7:45
Carter, as someone who has very little respect for airline boarding protocol, as being someone who's flown with you on a plane, how many elbowed 6 to 10 grandmothers that at least I've seen? And I know you don't care. Getting to the front at any cost is the Stephen Carter mentality. So what do you think? I mean, we're supposed to be crushing DeSantis here, but Corey has an MBA, so he wanted to take this in a different direction. Well,
Carter
8:10
Well, Corey's so wrong, though. First of all, there is a much faster way to board a plane, and it is not everybody fucking storming the plane. You start off with the window seats first. You can even go in random order on the window seats. Then you go with the aisles and then you go or then you go with the middle seats and then you go to the aisle seats. Everybody knows this. Everybody who's ever watched the Internet knows that that's the proper way to board a plane. Everybody's ever watched the Internet. Nonetheless, what this does is it proves to me that I'm in fact right. Because if DeSantis says that there is no benefit to this, then everybody goes back to my discussion
Carter
8:47
discussion of vaccination in the last podcast where I said, I believe, correct me if I'm wrong. we need to have uh multiple levels level one level two level three i said level three all the way down to z which he wouldn't even recognize as a letter because he doesn't know how to add the proper way of saying the english letter z so this is this is just reinforcement to my theory that i'm always right uh which is in fact now scientifically proven that
Zain
9:15
that was very long-winded uh i'm right thank you i think you made a point there i'm sorry cory do you have a retort to this or should I move it on to our next headline? Oh, I think you can move it on.
Zain
9:27
You can move it on. How
Carter
9:28
How does he get the retort? I never get a retort.
Zain
9:31
You do get a retort. Not
Zain
9:33
You don't answer the questions. If you don't get a retort,
Carter
9:36
retort, you don't answer the questions. Oh, you have to answer the questions. Yeah,
Zain
9:37
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our next headline comes to us from Forbes. Hillary Clinton is co-writing a political thriller novel. That is it. That is the headline.
Zain
9:48
is co-authoring a political thriller novel. I just wanted to see if there's any reaction. If there's nothing, I will move on. I do not care. I'm
Carter
9:54
I'm still eating my cake.
Zain
9:56
Carter's eating his cake. We'll move it on to our next headline.
Zain
9:59
Now, guys, when I don't find a headline, but I know there's a story, sometimes I write the headline. And this one comes to us from Strategist Media. That is, of course, our headline bot, i.e. me. Conservatives NDP fail at social media one day apart. Let's talk about this, because no
Corey
10:14
no one was writing about this in
Zain
10:16
in mainstream media. And I wanted to figure out a way to talk about it without doing a whole segment. What the fuck is going on? And how did this happen? And just for some context, Corey, you may have a better sense of what the NDP one was, but I feel like they created a mock schedule between Trudeau and Biden for the first official leaders meeting. And then they had like handwritten annotations, like ice cream lunch and all this sort of weird stuff. It fell flat on its face. It got ratioed. And then the day after, Aaron O'Toole released a video where he was out in front of Justin Trudeau's office saying, if we're successful as a party, we're going to move this guy pointing at the plaque at Justin Trudeau's office from here to and then camera pans to an outhouse located 10 feet away from the office. Both getting ratioed pretty hard, both not landing with the intended effect. We can dissect what happened, but I want to pretty much know from you guys why it happened. And if either of you have thoughts on how these sort of things come up and how these fails that are so clear to the audience within a matter of quite literally seconds get past what is a very sometimes rigorous vetting process to put stuff up on the official accounts.
Corey
11:29
Yeah, well, I think that in some ways it's very similar to why DeSantis made the decisions that he made in Florida. And it's that ultimately what gets measured matters. And as DeSantis is chasing this notion that he wants to vaccinate as many people as possible because that's what's being reported on, so he does things like letting grandma languish while 20-year-old beach
Corey
11:52
guy manages to get to the front of the line. you've got these uh these parties with o'toole and and sing who are just chasing these social media hits these likes these shares these these things that ultimately don't matter very much at all but
Corey
12:08
but give them this rush of adrenaline that they're doing something and so social media in
Corey
12:13
in order to get the likes and the shares and the retweets um is very performative you're essentially doing something that plays to your base that will amplify you and kicks it out and when you're playing with that kind of fire when you're doing just these lame ass jokes that you're trying to get in as big of an audience as possible so you can get those numbers so you can convince yourself you're doing something that's worthwhile for your political cause you can very quickly go off the rails because like
Corey
12:38
like like you're um you're just on the edge of madness at that moment and and these kind of performative cringeworthy appeals only to the base kind of posts when
Corey
12:48
when the base isn't loving in them either like you are well and truly out on a limb because you've just done some pretty outrageous shit and i think that's what's happened ultimately with o2o and with the ndp and the post that they put out there carter
Zain
13:01
carter any uh any thoughts before i actually get to that um hillary clinton is writing a political thriller any thoughts on that before i move on nope
Zain
13:10
okay uh carter why would something like this happen do you agree with cory's analysis
Zain
13:14
analysis of what of of uh of perhaps why I
Carter
13:17
can't believe you left out the third example of this because the very next day, the guy who controls the Strategist Podcast Twitter account said that we're starting the party party. And all of a sudden, that's the new thing. And our social media manager has lost his freaking mind again. And we're interacting with like hundreds of people about our new party party. And I have to step in and clean things up, as I always do. right so what happens is that people start thinking that they're too smart by half right and uh they're going to come up with this really funny joke it plays in the room oftentimes because the people are really tired who are doing these types of things they've been doing a lot of them and there is a fine line kind of between brilliance and failure um and both
Carter
14:06
both of these were just on the other side of of uh brilliance now the the trick to it i think is just to not be so own um
Carter
14:14
well in the case of the ndp just they were just stupid uh in the case of o'toole um his was just mean mean-spirited you know he he cast um the antagonist as someone who was being you know as the prime minister getting put into it it
Carter
14:30
it was a bullying move you know by being put into the porta potty and i think that people saw that the the ndp thing it was just stupid it just it didn't even work on on any level so uh it's harder to defend and the strategist thing i mean whoever did it you know whatever it's a nice try i
Zain
14:48
mean i think at the heart of it not to say that i want to spend a ton of time dissecting this but if it was a if it was a shot at humor it wasn't necessarily clever in either way and i think you know the fact is that there was no elements of okay that was a nice twist or that was pretty funny or that was witty or that was self-deprecating it It was punching in a way that just felt awkward, even if you were a tribalistic supporter of one
Corey
15:12
one of those causes. So the self-deprecating point is the one for me. I think political comedy is best done when it's at your own expense. I've known some politicians who are pretty funny, and the common thread is that they're not mean. If anything, they are overly nice.
Corey
15:28
nice. I think of Kent Hare here in Calgary who – he will repeat his political jokes perpetually, and they make me laugh almost every time because he says it was just such a grin on his face. He's enjoying himself, and it's usually at his expense. The one he always loves to tell is the problem with political jokes is sometimes they get elected, which
Corey
15:50
which is a good joke. It's a good joke. But ultimately when you're a politician delivering that, that's at your own expense. and um when you have this situation where you're essentially carter
Corey
16:02
carter you're absolutely right the word bullying is appropriate when you're going out there and you're just trying to be this tough guy and say i'm gonna put you in the porta potty like that's junior high shit yeah sure and ultimately i think the ndp one was mean-spirited too i think this this whole like selfie thing this ice cream thing it didn't play because it was all snark and and truly it just wasn't that funny it wasn't funny comedy's tough to begin with uh zane you're right like it didn't really play with expectations in any kind of way it wasn't quirky it didn't have a natural audience the punchline seemed to be these guys suck and that's a punchline that's only going to play with so many people yeah
Zain
16:37
yeah yeah let's move it on to our final headline uh hillary clinton has co-wrote up shook averages i'm trying to get a reaction i really
Zain
16:46
really want you to know about out i
Carter
16:49
feel like she's telling us tell us what the book's about i
Zain
16:51
i don't know i only read the headlines and i was like maybe i'll throw this one in there uh our final one comes to us from cbc and we're going to focus on an alberta story for a second to close off our headlines three brothers helped solve the tech glitch that was crashing alberta's covid19 vaccine booking tool so there's our three computer science i don't know how a family produces three of these folks but But three, like, comp-side geniuses slash professionals who have put together a quick workaround, or did yesterday, we were recording on Thursday, but did in the early parts of yesterday, a workaround for the COVID vaccination booking website that allowed tens of thousands of people to actually book, you know, myself included, for my dad and a bunch of other seniors who needed the assistance in the meantime. So I was a beneficiary of this workaround, which is partially why I want to talk about this. But Corey, I want to expand the scope to government tech, which is, maybe
Zain
17:51
maybe I'll start here. Why is it so bad?
Corey
17:55
you know what it can
Corey
17:57
can be it absolutely can be and there's reasons for that but you also have to understand that like most things in government the the scale that they're playing with the parameters under which they work are significantly more difficult than they are for say a startup who are creating an app out of the blue there's not a lot of excuses for the mistake that occurred which you know if i'm going to summarize for non-technical people is there was a there was was a jquery dependency and when it broke everything broke and ultimately none of that's necessary for
Zain
18:27
for non-technical people yeah that was that was great oh no
Carter
18:31
no i totally understood it now none
Corey
18:33
none of it was necessary none of it was necessary because it was really just sort of doing a check in real time and if you just had an old-fashioned form where you put in your postal code and see if it works then it would have worked just fine um but
Corey
18:45
but the thing that the thing is government is is complex. There are an awful lot of legacy systems that are carried along. These systems are huge, so they don't get updated as frequently. They have to build to an accessibility standard that is well beyond what the average person will do. I mean, governments were carrying Internet Explorer 6, if that means anything to people, for way, way longer than most people. And as a result, the technology can be pretty effing janky, I guess is the best way I can put The other thing is, it's really tough to test these things. It's tough to test things
Corey
19:17
things like this, because the general ways that you test scale is basically by having a bunch of, you
Corey
19:25
you know, essentially test submissions. But that's not really what was happening here. And what was happening was a different type of scale problem. So, yeah,
Corey
19:35
yeah, easy to kind of miss.
Corey
19:40
I can't believe it took them so long to fix. I feel like that should have been identified rather quickly, and they should have had better debugging going on. But, yeah,
Corey
19:47
yeah, government's just not – there's this famous chart of all of the different government organizations involved in Obamacare.
Corey
19:55
Obamacare. You know how that website really kind of crashed and burned? I'll try to find it. I'll try to post it on social media. But it's dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. And when you start looking at that, things can go wrong in a hurry. And ultimately, what really brought down the Obamacare website in those early days was an equally kind of stupid technical glitch that you wouldn't necessarily pick. They didn't have caching on in that case, so they weren't saving copies of things, and everything was a query, which really overwhelmed the system very quickly.
Corey
20:27
So I guess my final point is these things are – any
Corey
20:30
any programmer, any developer will tell you a
Corey
20:34
a million stories about the
Corey
20:36
the stupidest fucking bug in the world that they didn't catch. I mean it's just kind of a hazard of the business too. These things always seem obvious in hindsight. Most of the errors you come across after you've had a cup of coffee and talked to a rubber duck on your desk, which is a real thing by the way, you can come to the conclusion on. But if
Corey
20:55
you don't see it, you don't see it.
Zain
20:57
I'm going to ask you another side of this question. Do
Zain
21:00
Do things like this impact the brand of a government?
Carter
21:04
Well, they do in the moment, and they do if they happen over and over again. I mean, Obamacare is a good example of something where the opposition was dedicated to impacting the brand of the government of the day, so they took it up. I don't think that this mistake
Carter
21:19
mistake lives on that scale, and I don't think that the NDP were going to grab it and run with it and make such a big deal of it. Maybe it would have, if it was the federal conservatives taking apart the Trudeau government, they might have tried to make more hay. But realistically, these are mistakes that happen in government. And if you want to be in government, and you start to just pick these things apart, you do run into a problem.
Carter
21:44
Because it happens with every administration. If you're in government, you're making mistakes like this. This is a that you know, you don't see this type of mistake in business, because generally speaking, businesses scale up much differently than just the turn on model that something like this. This is a turn-on model. And I think that if Tesla all of a sudden turned on their sales system and they were going to sell 400,000 Teslas in a day, they'd have problems. They didn't do it that way, right? We remember them selling 400,000 Model 3s, but they'd sold Roadsters
Carter
22:20
Roadsters and the Model S and all the other models prior to selling the big Model 3. So they'd built up. They had experience. And this is not something that I look at the government and say, well, you had a lot of experience with this. I mean, there was a joke that someone made on Twitter that said maybe they should have asked Ticketmaster to do it. You know what? That could have been a viable option. But they
Carter
22:44
they built instead a reservation platform from scratch.
Carter
22:49
That's pretty good. And to have it basically fully functional within a few hours, you know, with the workaround, I think they did fine. And I don't think it's going to impact them too much.
Zain
23:00
We'll move it on to our segment for the episode. If it's a budget, you best fudge it. Corey, budget, budget, deep cut for you. You're welcome. Yeah,
Zain
23:09
Yeah, you're welcome. Carter, you wouldn't get it.
Zain
23:13
I don't get it. Your silence is appreciated. It's a Raj
Corey
23:16
Raj Sherman thing. yeah
Corey
23:16
yeah it's a it's a reference to a former alberta liberal leader from like 2011 oh
Carter
23:22
oh i'm glad we shared it then on the podcast yeah yeah no so what you're saying is that that joke was like the nenshi noun of this podcast let
Zain
23:29
let me tell you something this podcast may have lived its heyday in 2010 to 2012 just so you know i'm
Zain
23:35
i'm not saying that but i'm kind of saying that um before
Zain
23:40
yeah let's talk about the budget here in alberta we're going to spend uh you know the the majority of this episode, even though we spent 23 minutes on a headline. Did you guys know about Hillary Clinton? We're going to spend the majority of it on this. And guys, last time when we left our last episode, Corey, you had some advice for Jason Kenney, which was do less of your job. Less is more. Carter, you also had some advice for Jason Kenney. Balance on both sides of the ledger. Let's start with initial hits on did the budget today meet your expectations in terms of your one word, one sentence of advice. And then I want to do a couple of things. I want to dissect this budget on three different strands, the message, the communications tactics, which I think are always fun to discuss, because we've got a microsite and a video and then a headline related to it, and then the content of it. But I want to get your first take for and Carter, I'm going to start with you. Balance both sides of the ledger. Did you see it? Did that meet expectations for you? No,
Carter
24:34
No, there was absolutely no balance. I mean, they
Carter
24:36
they said no new taxes, no new tax increases. There were some tax increases. The education property tax seems to have gone up. Income taxes are projected to rise by 6.4%. I can't tell entirely if that's from income rise, which doesn't make much sense to me, or some sort of bracket creep. Yeah,
Corey
24:54
Yeah, indexing was turned off a couple of years ago.
Carter
24:56
ago. Yeah. So bottom
Carter
24:58
bottom line, there were some modest taxation changes. But ultimately, any changes that were managed, and arguably there weren't many, were managed on the expense side of the ledger, which was not in keeping with my balanced idea. idea um and worse than that you know oil prices are going back up again uh which is going to create some fake
Carter
25:21
fake revenue i mean it's real revenue for the moment but um i think we've just learned that you can't project necessarily uh royalties forward uh forever uh so this is a a mistake in my mind because um from
Carter
25:36
from 20 what what was the last year the real last balanced budget like Like 2007, 2008, we've been kicking the ball down the road a little bit, hoping that the next government would figure it out. And Jason Kenney just kicked the ball down the road again.
Zain
25:54
Corey, did this meet your headline of do less of your job?
Corey
26:00
In a sense, it did, Zane. I think there was less ambition to sort of remake society, remake projects and programs like AISH. In another sense, I'm not so sure. I think ultimately, this is a bit of a Franken budget. And I've been contemplating it since it was released and trying to make heads or tails of it and understand what exactly it says about the governing party and its ambitions going forward. And, I mean, it almost feels like a split personality budget when you read Tave's remarks and you hear the comments he's making about, like, literally, I'm going to read you a quote here. I ask all Albertans to reflect on this. If we know that past excesses were ill-conceived and have left us depleted, then let us apply that wisdom to our decisions today.
Corey
26:44
Together, we will make better choices that consider the fortunes of future Albertans. Okay, interesting, because this is literally the largest deficit ever, but for the deficit this year. right and so i guess my point is not what a hypocrite because we are in a pandemic and i can appreciate that i i guess my point is that's some really strong language and in general the language is the language you would expect to find in a much more combative much more right-wing budget than the one that we ultimately got and you see a couple of programs and cuts and and projects you know sort of slice through where you're like well this this seems totally different For
Corey
27:23
For example, the reduction of salaries
Corey
27:27
salaries of public servants that was mentioned in the budget speech. And lower amounts
Corey
27:32
amounts have been budgeted in the budget. There are other ones as well that we can get into. to but i guess my point is it sort of felt like it
Corey
27:42
it was two budgets fighting with each other within this budget frame and as a result the messaging is
Corey
27:48
is really really kind of rough and i don't mean that in the sense that like it's not well crafted it's just it's it's so um it's like whiplash from one paragraph to the next and as a result i don't know what i think of this budget yet does
Zain
28:02
that Does that truly surprise you, though, guys, like considering the fact that this is a caucus
Zain
28:07
caucus that we've heard is divided in two ways? Does that actually surprise you, Carter? You're going to jump in. You had an answer. Yeah,
Carter
28:14
Yeah, it does. It surprises me because budgets are storytelling opportunities, and this is a story that's not being told. And the first group of people you need to tell your story to is your caucus, right? What is the story that we're trying to tell? And, you know, for example, our budget, the budget that I got to work on, the budget story that we were trying to tell is tackling our $3 billion deficit, which at the time was a tremendous sin. But,
Carter
28:43
you know, we had a story about investing in post-secondary education. We had a story about how we were reinvigorating health care. We had stories about how Albertans would benefit from Mars, our budget. budget you see subsequent budgets have been strong stories about how the economy is being re-envisioned or how the government of the day is is working to protect alberta jobs or reinvigorate or diversify the economy you
Carter
29:09
you read this i don't
Carter
29:11
what the government's vision is i don't know what the central through line is i i
Carter
29:15
i read and i write these things i don't know what i'm supposed to be reading in this particular document and i will tell you this too the
Carter
29:23
the words The words that Tave said don't actually match the document that I read. I completely agree.
Carter
29:29
The words that he said were kind of this hard-ass, we're making tough choices, we're going in a difficult direction. And I will concede that taking a billion dollars of public sector worker salary and saying you're going to give that up now is a significant amount of money. But they didn't actually do anything in this budget. They didn't actually tackle the big questions of how are we going to make health care more sustainable? How are we going to invest? How are we going to generate new jobs? They invested $700 million in technology jobs to try and invigorate new technology while cutting post-secondary education where we're going to train the people who are going to take those jobs. jobs so how are those two things linked tell me the story mr premier he's not telling us a story and it sounds to me like um this is a budget that was created uh you know cory's words the frankenstein budget um but without the frankenstein story okay
Zain
30:26
okay i'm glad you got into this because the first element i want to dissect is message so we were already on it which is great carter thanks for your thoughts on that cory i'm going to ask you a question that might sound weird and tell me me if i'm if it's a stupid question in many ways is there any strategy to taves doing this to having words that say something more aggressive than the numbers um and is there any and if there is strategy is it is it a good one and maybe i'll start with you there and then get your thoughts on message overall as well while you're while you're at it there
Corey
30:57
there there is a school of thought that says if you just put out content and that content will play with an audience you can use it and in these deeply partisan times, that audience will ignore the counter content. So you're able to point to tough guy Taves and the messaging there, and they will ignore the fact that this is one of the largest budgets. Well, it's the second largest deficit ever. Interesting point here, of all of the UCP budgets, both actual and projected in budget documents now, there is only one NDP budget that had a higher deficit than the lowest of the UCP deficits. So, like, we're through the looking glass here. And the idea that you are going to be able to sort of spin it as tough action when it's the biggest deficits ever, I think, is a bit of a stretch. And I think some of the UCP's former words are going to come back and haunt them. Two things in particular I think about. One was, you recall during the election, I suspect, Zane, because you worked on Notley's campaign, the covers to the newspaper that said, we're heading towards $100 million of debt.
Corey
32:03
Yeah, and then some. Yeah, that's $100 million we would kill
Corey
32:08
kill for that. Yeah,
Carter
32:08
Yeah, in the rearview mirror. That would be
Corey
32:10
The other component of that was whenever the NDP said, yeah, but our debt to GDP ratio is still great. And at the time, it was the best in the country. Now it's not the best in the country. But now you're seeing the UCP start to use the language. Yeah, but our debt to GDP ratio is great. And I just feel like chickens are coming home to roost a little bit on this. And so I would have avoided some of these phrases if only because I have been so strong about them before. because there are going to be people in the UCP who
Corey
32:41
listened and believed. And we all know that there's a bit of a, you
Corey
32:44
you know, there's a bit of a challenge with the rightward flank of the UCP right now, thinking this is perhaps not a conservative enough approach to many things. The lockdown and budget now are probably the two biggest ones.
Corey
32:57
but I couldn't like, you know, I couldn't agree more with what Stephen said about budgets being storytelling opportunities. Like I emphatically agree with that. Carter did a budget. I did five. It's not a flex if it's true. And the common
Corey
33:13
thread of all of them is at least there's an attempt to weave a narrative through them. Right?
Corey
33:22
And this seemed like a chase two rabbits catch neither kind of budget. You know, I read the documents, I read the speech, I read the coverage, I watched as much as I could of the TAVES presser. I would have watched all of it. But for time, I mean, it's like we're just hours after this budget was released. but this, this budget was called like lives and livelihoods, which is kind of carried over from COVID.
Corey
33:43
I think it would have been more honest to say it's like a regroup and refocus. Like we're just gonna, and I don't suggest that as a budget name, that'd be just a grim budget name, but that's the reality of what this budget was. And I think that the framing around it needed to better reflect that they didn't do anything crazy. They, they didn't reduce spending in most areas. Certainly any area where there's been any kind of fuss kicked up, You saw either holding the line or even more money, areas where people tend to kind of drift their attention, like post-secondary, and obviously, full disclosure, I work at a post-secondary institution. I think post-secondary institutions are great investments and worth putting more money in, but they got hit. I think that's because
Corey
34:24
because generally volumes are lower on that, and that's unfortunate, but that's the reality.
Zain
34:30
Carter, I want to also talk to you about, Corey teased into this, the message of how the budget was presented, this lives and livelihoods headline, and then the three focal points, investing in health care, preparing for recovery and maintaining responsible spending. What did you kind of think of that as what a person who maybe wasn't listening to the TAVE speech or watching the coverage would land upon if they Googled Alberta budget right now? Well,
Carter
34:57
I think if you Google Alberta budget, you're going to get a whole bunch of nothing. I mean, it's just it's like catching a cloud. You know, it's it's it's not really something that's there. You can see it, but it hasn't really changed very much. I know that there's some people who are going to be sad. I know there's going to be some people who are upset.
Carter
35:16
There's going to be other people who are happy. I know that age recipients are are very happy that they haven't been impacted as much as was rumored. But overall, the average Albertan does not see that big of a difference. And what I was thinking about is the arc of the story that goes over four years, because this is the other thing that we, budgets, our budgets are almost the equivalent of the State of the Union, right?
Carter
35:41
right? The finance minister stands up and tells us how hard it's going to be. So you basically want your budgets to go like this. You want your first year, the finance minister is taking a pair of old shoes and really buffing them up and making them look all good because it's a tough year, but we're going to make it happen. Year two, it's a pair of work boots that they've grabbed and they've buffed them all up and they're getting to work. You know, they're taking forward and we're moving things forward. Year three, you know, it's a pair of economy shoes, right? Because things are okay, but, you know, we've still got a long way to go. So in year four, it's like, we got brand new tap shoes. We're really making things happen. And you've got a cycle of a story that says we are going in a direction that we wish to go. And I got to be honest with you, this budget doesn't feel like it's got direction in the middle at the beginning or the end of any of that cycle because it is so kind
Carter
36:35
of screwed up with the development of what it's supposed to be. It is not – it's not great for anybody. The agricultural sector is not going to come out and say, well, that's great for us. The tourism sector might be OK for a moment. But really – and don't even get me started on post-secondary, which is a complete
Carter
36:54
complete disaster given that we are trying to change the economy from resources
Carter
36:59
resources to something other than resources. You need to be educated for that and you're just not. So this budget to me is – it's billions and billions of dollars of spending. spending, no recognition of the actual problems, whether you're Ken Bozenkul, who says, we've got to cut our spending, cut our spending, cut our spending. He didn't get what he wanted. And I'm like, well, no one got what I wanted, which was a more balanced revenue model.
Zain
37:25
You know what? Go ahead, Corey, jump in. And I've got something to kind of dovetail off what Carter said there as well.
Corey
37:30
Well, Carter's point about the arc is really an important one, because normally what you would see by two years into a government's term is they're trying to make the pivot back towards the general election so you do the unpopular things at the start the conventional wisdom is you do the unpopular things at the start you do the popular things at the end uh and you kind of create this um you know this nice story that moves forward and um and that's not really something that the government's been afforded because of the times we find ourselves in um the
Corey
37:59
the covid has just blown up everything in all sorts of contexts and governments everywhere are having to adjust to different realities here but But I
Corey
38:06
I don't know where they go from here. I guess that's my biggest point. And it's part of what I mean when I say I was a little confused reading the document. And it's always a bit of a dangerous situation when you can't really read the intentions of the government going forward. This doesn't necessarily seem like a pivot budget. It seems like we wanted to do a bunch of stuff, but we can't right now. Budget, right? And that's interesting to me. Now, as far as the individual moment of the budget, Carter mentioned it was a whole bunch of nothing. It would be hard to kind of peg it. People could Google it, not really know it. I do want to stress sometimes that's the plan. Sometimes the win is not getting the headline and just moving to another day. But ultimately, I think that a lot of us in this province are looking for tea leaves and saying, what
Corey
38:54
what does this mean going forward?
Corey
38:56
And I don't know what this means going forward. Yeah,
Zain
38:59
Yeah, you know, you guys both make an interesting point. And while you're speaking, it almost makes me think that while they're certainly trying to use the pandemic as a rationale for many things, as a rationale for the spending, as a rationale for not giving us the balanced budgets in their first term, which the finance minister said that is not going to happen. And they they've been really poor at using it as as an excuse or a pivot. And I don't mean just about this budget, but I mean, about this government in general, like there is opportunity while every government struggles to figure out how to, you know, grapple with the pandemic, there does seem to be opportunity for some governments who said, fuck it, we're just going to lean right into it. And we're going to be the government that that made a recovery happen. We're going to throw away the initial playbook. And part of me wonders, do you guys feel like this government is hesitant to throw away the 2019 playbook? It seems like so much of it is that they want to do everything they can to not get rid of something that is clearly out of date, that is clearly
Zain
39:58
clearly like not applicable to the circumstance, but it seems like ideology seems to reign supreme. totally great
Corey
40:03
great point i'm not even sure it's ideology but you
Corey
40:06
you do have to ask yourself at a certain point is the plan not working because of the pandemic or is the plan just never going to work one of the things we do need to keep in mind is that we were looking at it alberta had an enormous deficit the year before the pandemic hit as well now january february march we're starting to get into that the economy is starting to have some shutters but still we're talking about an over 10 billion dollar deficit a huge swing to towards larger deficits than in years previous previous um we had seen reductions in the corporate income tax rate we had seen an easing of these labor restrictions and the promised jobs hadn't really been showing up even before the pandemic began and so i think in some in some senses it is it is kind of this ideological like we know you know there's the faith in this we believe this will work this has got to work this is exactly what our our philosophy is that's driven us and you know there here's all of the economic theory behind it, all of those things. And I think they're really reticent to walk away from it. Because if they do that, at this point, even if it's pivoting to deal with the crisis of the moment, it's
Corey
41:10
it's going to be very easy to say that economic theory was a failure. And so I think that's tied up into it. I think there's kind of bigger philosophical issues that make it quite difficult to walk away from that 2019 plan. Because the whole idea was we're going to remake make alberta exactly
Corey
41:27
that work started and
Corey
41:30
everything's gone to shit and is that correlation or causation if
Corey
41:34
if you walk away now and if you do something entirely different that's
Corey
41:38
that's a question that will always be in people's minds and a lot of people will say causal and so i think that's a bit of it here i i think that they want to stay the course because they fundamentally believe they need to stay the course uh both for their own credibility and the credibility of their movement Carter,
Zain
41:51
Carter, would you suggest that to them? You've talked about stories, so maybe I'll close off our message section in this budget overview with asking you, what would your strategic advice have been? I know this is not your political flavor, so to speak, but in terms of crafting a story, would you have told them that they should have picked one of the two lanes Corey identified earlier? Would you have told them to outright write a different story? Rory, what do you think, knowing your pulse of the province and their proclivities as a government, would your advice have been in terms of what their story should be broadly, broadly?
Carter
42:25
Jobs, economy, pipelines, right? They told us what their success was going to be. I thought
Corey
42:30
thought you were suggesting that's what they should do now. No,
Zain
42:32
they told me. He might come back to it. This might be a classic Hillary Clinton thriller. We never know where
Zain
42:37
it's going to end.
Carter
42:42
Fuckers. Now I'm going to be off track. Here's the thing. He told us what the benchmarks were, what the signposts of success would look like. He told us we'd be seeing an economic recovery. He told us that our jobs
Carter
42:55
jobs would be more secure, that the economy would be more secure, and that we'd be basically recovering if
Carter
43:03
if he was elected into the government.
Carter
43:06
Those are still the benchmarks. Those are still the signposts. He has not given us any other
Carter
43:11
other indication that maybe at
Carter
43:13
at this stage, just getting through COVID relatively
Carter
43:16
relatively intact is going to be a significant milestone. I mean, maybe
Carter
43:20
maybe that's what I would have done with the budget is tell the story of we had to redo everything. We had to redo everything and we had to recreate new signposts. And the new signposts that tell us if we're going to be on our way is that we have – that we can start to effectively make dents into the highest unemployment rate in Canada starting in January
Carter
43:40
January of 2022 or
Carter
43:44
June of 2021. Whatever the signpost is. But he hasn't changed the signposts. So I don't actually know.
Zain
43:50
Corey, you've given a good understanding of why they're not pivoting. But Carter, from your perspective, what do you think it is? Because
Carter
43:58
Because they can't, because they're not good, because it turns out that the government is bad and that's OK. You know, sometimes governments are bad. I don't think this is a particularly good budget budget because I think the people writing the budget aren't particularly good at writing budgets and they don't necessarily see the way out of it. Jason Kenney came in, as you pointed out, both of you with one specific ideological or values-centered idea of how government should work. That
Carter
44:27
That was completely undone by COVID. If ever there was a case to be made for a strong government model,
Carter
44:37
it is an international pandemic, right? Like this has impacted the economies, it's impacted the healthcare systems of the entire world. Forget about anything other than that. But this is a big thing, and it
Carter
44:52
it seems to have proven that his model doesn't actually work. So let us go back to –
Carter
45:00
he should have gone back and said, well, what is going to work? And he doesn't seem to have done that piece of the story development.
Zain
45:08
Corey, finish us off here, and then I'll move on to the communications products.
Corey
45:13
Well, I disagree with Carter. I think that there was an attempt at new signposting. I think that's what Lives and Livelihoods is all about. I think that's why it's been repeated so much. That is the different signposting. But the problem is the old signposts are there, too.
Corey
45:27
There's so much of the old story here as well. This budget, ultimately, to me, is a draft with too many authors. Maybe it's not even that it's not telling a story. It's that it's telling two different stories. And I don't know which one is foreshadowing the next chapter.
Zain
45:44
Okay, let's leave the message and let's move on quickly to communications products and packaging. I know both of you have been intimately involved in that element of it. So I want to get your take on what you saw. So we've got a microsite as usual, alberta.ca slash budget. And if you're in front of a computer or your smartphone, starts with a simple landing page, icons, a one-minute video, lives and livelihoods everywhere. Corey, give me, you know, we've talked message. Give me your take on the communications products. And perhaps even an insight into how these are developed. Are these GOA products?
Corey
46:20
This is GOA. And this is, by the way, these are with very few differences. I could name them, but it would be boring if I did. This is the exact same budget page that's been used for the last couple of budgets. This approach is very common at this point. This was used for every UCP budget to date. And it's a rather turnkey process. And in fact, if you go into the budget documents themselves and you look at the aesthetic of them, again, exact same approach to budget documents. Nothing has changed there. There's been no kind of re-skinning or rebranding. I like that personally. I think governments spend a lot of time thinking about what these things look like. The reality is that consistency is both cheaper and easier to use. And in addition to those two benefits, it also has – it reflects the reality that people don't just look at budget documents all day and say, God, I'm so bored with the fact that they made this budget document. and look this way again. Ugh, you know, like that's just not something people do. So I think it's just smart. As far as the language and how this all works, the process is, it involves many cooks in the kitchen, I guess is what I would say. You have Treasury Board and Finance who are really holding the pen on most of the products. You do have the communication staff at CPE who they're the ones who make these web products and put it into web language and are often suggesting drafts back on language. which I don't know how it's, you know, for sure how it's worked this time, but I'll tell you in the past, that is how it's worked. And ultimately, a lot of it flows from, or historically, I should say, how it's worked is there are like source documents. There is, this is the thing. And all of the other documents will reflect the tone and tenor of this. And I think
Corey
48:02
think that's really what you got here again. I actually think this is pretty pat, and that's not a bad thing. Again, it reinforces this was not intended to be a splashy look here budget. It was a, hey, it's February. We said we'd release a budget in February. Here's your budget. Yeah,
Zain
48:18
Yeah, here you go. Carter, I want to get your take on this, both around, Corey's answered a few of my questions around this, which is great, because we can power through if you don't have much more to say on it as well, around branding, like how much effort and what do you make of the brand and the products that you see, microsite videos and social media cards, pretty standard stuff. Is that fine for this iteration? Is that what you would have wanted? Or would you have perhaps pushed the envelope a bit more?
Carter
48:47
Well, I don't think I would. So if you go to the revenue tab, I'm not sure that I would pick a photograph of two people in reflective blue coveralls walking to an oil facility, it would appear. You
Carter
49:02
You know, it just doesn't look the way you want it to look. I mean, I think that that is this government, though. That's this government. cares i care i
Carter
49:10
care because i'm tired this is actually that's at the heart of my question do people care i do because i'm tired of this i'm tired of this this pretending cory that we've had for two years that everything is going to come back just the way that it was and if you look at this budget this entire budget is constructed on a model of well i hope it gets better soon i hope the oil and gas community continues to pump they even so not only did they not cut the war room spending they have created another oil and gas agency in intergovernmental affairs which is controlled by the the premier himself with another two million dollar budget so they are doubling down and tripling down on an industry that doesn't make sense which
Carter
49:54
doesn't mean we're going to stop using oil tomorrow everybody we understand we understand that the oil price is up today that we understand that but that's not the point it's going to go through fluctuation But we're not going to see that giant boom that we saw in 2012 to 2014.
Corey
50:12
Have pity for the poor designers who have to put options up to the premier's office as to what these look like. What do you want to have as a picture for revenue? People with their pockets being picked? I mean, you've ultimately got to pick a picture for revenue that is not going to offend anybody or make them feel assaulted when they see it. And ultimately, non-renewable resource revenue is a very good one. And you could show a picture of Justin Trudeau. He's paying for so
Carter
50:35
so much of this budget. This is Alberta, baby. Put up a fucking photograph of a casino because we get more money from that when we do from this non-renewable resource revenue right now.
Corey
50:44
There are certain things that you have to do in communications like when you work for an organization like CPE that are like these perennial painful conversations. And one of them is what's the right photo for X? And there's about 12 different things for X. Hero images,
Corey
50:58
images, yeah. yeah well and you go go around and you you have the same conversation but just with a twist same deal with colors what's the color we want to use right now i think a perfect example is the color purple has been used for all of this covet stuff i wasn't there i can imagine the conversation about the color purple would you like to hear a short recap of it here please
Zain
51:16
it's not a flex it's true it's a one-man tiktok play cory hogan please the stage is all yours oh my god yeah
Corey
51:23
go ahead so what you need to know is the government of alberta has a palette there's like six colors. So you want to use blue? No, it's a global health emergency. We don't want it associated with the government's main brand. Okay, well, let's go to the next color. That's orange. We can't use orange for that because that's the NDP's color and it will look like it's a partisan attack. Let's use green. Can't use green outside because it just blends into the background. So we can't use it for any of our signage outside. You're going to have to pick a different color still. Yellow, not enough contrast. You're going to have accessibility challenges. So let's go to the hot pink. Oh, I don't like the hot pink. It doesn't look particularly good let's go to the secondary version of all of those colors have the exact same conversation and end up on fucking purple because it's the secondary to the hot pink that's what happens every goddamn time you have a conversation like this in government it's actually better now because under the ndp it was like you do the color wheel but you'd stay off blue because it was too partisan for the ucp as well so like again some of these decisions just don't read too much into them i guess is my point like they they are made nobody
Corey
52:20
nobody sat there and said They may have discussed this picture. I suspect they did. Nobody sat there and convened a meeting saying, we've really got to handle the budget 2021 revenue hero image.
Carter
52:31
I just can't believe you stayed there as long as you did.
Carter
52:34
I mean, that would fucking kill me. I would die.
Carter
52:37
That was exhausting. Just listening to you describe it. It was brutal.
Carter
52:43
Thanks, bud. It was a fun job. No, it's good. I'm glad we heard it. Yeah, thanks. Corey
Zain
52:47
Corey thrived in a certain environment, and he just described to us that environment. but
Zain
52:51
let's move it on to the actual dollars and cents we've already covered some of it but let's let's ask you guys what surprised you what pissed you off what was um interesting carter you mentioned post-sec uh we haven't really talked about health or education per se so maybe if we want to go there just edging you in that in that direction if that's something you guys want to talk about and then some of the smaller ticket items that saw cuts i saw in within culture and status of women seeing cuts with for symbolic reasons and you know there's been some tweets around not much around the vulnerable, around housing, and then the big cuts around municipal governments as well. So those are just some items to throw your way on the cut side. Of course, if you want to talk about some of the other programs that they're introducing around diversification, et cetera, we can do that. But Carter, maybe I'll start with you. Any additional surprises from the actual content beyond what you've already mentioned? Yeah,
Carter
53:40
Yeah, I mean, I'll throw one little thing in there. I mean, they're talking about building more. So this new budget came with the new influx of money that would be being used on capital spending.
Carter
53:51
So we're going to build a whole bunch of new things. We're going to build some bridges.
Carter
53:54
bridges. We're going to build some roads. We're going to build some schools.
Carter
53:58
But we're not going to build the green line, right?
Carter
54:00
right? So that money has been kicked down the road a little bit.
Carter
54:03
Well, a whole bunch of new money has been injected.
Carter
54:06
So the one project that the city of Calgary actually has in the books, we're not going to do that.
Carter
54:10
We're going to curtail our amount of money that we're spending on education. We're
Carter
54:14
We're going to to curtail the amount of money that we're spending on healthcare,
Carter
54:16
healthcare, but we're going to build more facilities there. We're going to build more capital expenditures. We're going to pull back the amount of money that we actually spend on maintenance and refurbishment of our capital assets, but we're going to build a whole bunch of new stuff. So again, this comes to me to be this disconnect, right? Because they've thrown about, I think it's one and a half billion, three and a half billion, I don't know, billion here, billion there, as soon as you start talking about real money um you
Carter
54:43
you know but they're throwing around a bunch of new spending without valuing the people who go into that spending without valuing the activity that happens in those buildings and without valuing the decisions that are being made by their
Carter
54:57
their municipal partners and it just it
Carter
54:58
it confused me again it brings me back to what's the story you're trying to tell the capital never needs to be upgraded that the capital doesn't need people working in it You know, you're building, how much is that total cancer center, Corey? Like it's billions,
Carter
55:13
The cancer center is going to be at least three and a half, four billion dollars.
Carter
55:18
How about the people who work there, right?
Carter
55:20
right? This thing didn't exist four years ago and we really haven't increased the amount of spending in healthcare for four years. Who are the people that are going to be working there? Where are they coming from? Where are these nurses, the support staff, the doctors? Are they all somewhere cramped in some little facility somewhere? Now, this is a new spend with new requirements, and we're not going to see nearly the level of investment to support these. Remember when the South Hospital was built here in Calgary? We didn't staff that thing up forever. I'm not even sure it's still staffed up, because it turns out to staff up a big capital asset, you need to hire more staff. None of that's been reflected in this budget. Total cross-purposes moments in this budget.
Zain
56:04
Corey, what do you think? Any items on the content side that caught your eye?
Corey
56:11
I mean, there was the jobs
Corey
56:14
jobs thing. What was it called? I'm now trying to remember. Jobs Now, right? There's some interesting, increasing
Corey
56:20
increasing urgency to jobs program naming, isn't
Corey
56:23
As we've moved on. Alberta Jobs Now is about as breathless as you can get. And that's, I
Corey
56:32
I thought that really struck me. I'll be curious to see what programs come out of that, what they have in mind. Because a lot of the language around it was not just about economic impact, but it was about the value of work. And that's kind of like, yeah, Dust Bowl talk. That's like, let's have ditch diggers go and dig ditches, and then another group go fill them in kind of talk. So I'm really curious to see what kind of programs come out of this Jobs Now initiative. initiative let's
Zain
56:58
talk about two two numbers and the political impact of them the debt and the deficit um
Zain
57:04
um you know large
Zain
57:05
large numbers the and the ucp saying they're not going to be balancing the budget in their first term and admission today by the finance minister uh
Corey
57:14
uh gotta love that uh first term bit though yeah right right right yeah
Zain
57:18
yeah yeah 116 106 close to 116 billion dollar debt, looking at an 18 plus billion dollar deficit.
Zain
57:30
This is a party that's been about fiscal restraint, fiscal constraint in many ways. Stephen Carter, political impact here that you see, are people just going to outright give them a pass on the pandemic and the ballot box will be, yeah, whatever, they had to do what they had to do? Or do you feel like them not meeting some of these promises and fiscal thresholds will actually bite them in the butt, especially from the right-hand side of the political spectrum in Alberta. I'm
Carter
57:57
I'm going to remain consistent for once. I
Carter
57:59
I think this is the first time.
Carter
58:03
don't think people care about debt and deficits. I think they pretend to care about debt and deficits until you ask them if you want to spend money on health care. So I don't think the debt is going to hurt them. I do think that there's a possibility that the lack of spending on health care and education bites them in the butt by the people who use those services. Do
Zain
58:22
you feel like they had a license in this budget to spend a shitload more on health and education? Do you feel like with their political coalition that they had the license? I
Carter
58:30
I think that they felt they had the license to spend more money on capital. Ergo, they must have had the license to spend more on some things. But they don't want to do that. They don't want to put more money into health care. They want to put more money into buildings, which just confuses the hell out of me. But that's what they brought to the table this time.
Zain
58:50
Corey, I'm going to ask you the same two questions, you know, maybe the second one first. Do you feel like they had a license from the political, the constellation of the political sort of base that they have to spend more? And secondly, this larger sort of question on debt and deficit and the political impact that it might have for them heading forward?
Corey
59:10
Well, they had a license from the province. The question you asked me was a little different. Do they have a license from their political base?
Corey
59:16
I'm not sure they do. And I think that's actually one of the challenges they face. When you poll on deficit, and Carter
Corey
59:23
Carter is right, but I am going to put a bit of an asterisk on it. It's not just that you can say to people, do you care about the deficit? And they say yes until you put real things in front of them. Most people will actually just not really care about the deficit. If you do a poll and say, by what year do you want the deficit done
Corey
59:40
done and dusted, like no more deficit,
Corey
59:43
I think the majority of people, if I'm remembering the last poll I saw on this, will pick a year that's far enough out that it's outside of the current political term, right? Like no matter what time. That's not even specific to this moment. And a huge chunk of people will actually say, I do not care if you ever settle the deficit. However, there's a block of 20% or so diehards who think that even next year is not soon enough. Why do we have a deficit at all? You absolutely must get rid of this deficit. And that group, even though I think that many of them, if you really push them on some matters, would say, yeah, OK, I guess there's some extenuating circumstances.
Corey
1:00:17
By and large, that group must be lighting their hair on fire
Corey
1:00:19
with deficits at the levels that we're seeing right now. You look at those charts, you see the size of those red bars, you see the amount of ink we're bleeding representing the dollars we're spending. It must be driving certain groups within the conservative coalition absolutely up the wall. And that is a real risk for Jason Kenney right now. You'll see the Drew Barnes of the world having a couple
Corey
1:00:39
couple more champions beside them. You're going to start hearing a little bit more criticism about the deficit and the need to do more on that. And ultimately, it will
Corey
1:00:49
will not take a lot to fundamentally change the math in this province. Polls right now are already showing Rachel Notley in the lead.
Corey
1:00:57
What happens if there's a conservative alternative, even if they're just taking the same amount of vote that the Wild Rose Alliance and then the Wild Rose Party after them managed to get? That's a real problem for Jason Kenney as he starts looking towards 2023. So keeping that coalition together is going to require – and I think if I go back and if I want to see some strategy in this disjointed budget, having that tough guy language, even if it wasn't a tough guy budget, maybe
Corey
1:01:23
maybe that was the plan there. I don't think it's going to work with the other audience, though.
Zain
1:01:28
Carter? I'm Rachel Notley. I'm soliciting some advice from you on the phone tonight. It's 930. I've put out a bunch of statements regarding what is missing in this budget. 630-plus million cut from health care. 160 million cut from schools 750 million cut from municipalities are you telling me keep hitting them on every angle are you telling me pick a lane what is the strategy here as the official opposition especially one that cory as as just mentioned to um seems to be well positioned in many ways 2023 is a long ways away to to you know potentially returning what what should her perspective be on on a budget like this and how should her and the ndp look
Zain
1:02:10
look at the the document the messaging uh
Zain
1:02:14
uh and and pick it apart i
Carter
1:02:16
i would focus on on jobs
Carter
1:02:21
you know the economic recovery so
Carter
1:02:23
so right now the
Carter
1:02:25
the number of people not
Zain
1:02:26
not not not and when just so i could interrupt they're not traditional ndp territory i just want to make sure i add that that element to it you're
Carter
1:02:33
you're being Now, you can also tie those jobs and economic
Carter
1:02:36
economic recovery to nurses,
Carter
1:02:38
nurses, teachers, social workers, right? Because the people whose jobs are now at risk, you know, we talked about all the jobs that were being lost in the oil patch. Those jobs are all gone, right?
Carter
1:02:50
right? Right. The next group of people to lose their jobs are, you know, there's been the
Carter
1:02:56
the unions are all talking about 15000 job losses. I don't think that that's actually what's going to happen. But the people who are going to lose their jobs are now social workers, nurses and teachers. The people who are going to see their salaries reduced are social workers, nurses and teachers. Those people, how
Carter
1:03:13
how are we supposed to have an economy that functions when, what, 24%, 27% of our population is viewing and facing salary uncertainty? Are they going to be buying their next house? Are they going to be buying their next car? Are they the ones who are going to be going to Costco and buying the new freezer? Like, those are things that drive our economy. economy and
Carter
1:03:34
and when you put economic uncertainty in front of a significant portion of our population we're not going to be growing our our economy economies are largely things of myth right when things are good they just continue to cycle because money flows when things are bad money stops flowing and it makes things worse so right now about the last thing you wanted was things to be bad one of the things that's been quite positive i think about all the money that that Trudeau and, you know, to a lesser extent, Kenny have pumped into the COVID economy is that most of that money has cycled. It has come into people's pockets and gone out to others. And that's
Carter
1:04:14
that's kept the economy flowing. So cutting
Carter
1:04:17
cutting salaries, making jobs redundant and making things challenging, increasing, like what is 15,000 jobs, Corey, in terms of the percentage of unemployment? It's got to be close to 2%, right? Like 1% or 2%? No.
Corey
1:04:35
No, not even quite. The workforce is about 2.5 million people.
Carter
1:04:39
Okay, so less than that.
Carter
1:04:41
So 15,000 jobs would be 1
Corey
1:04:46
It would be about 0.6%. Let's
Carter
1:04:47
Let's round it up to 1%. The
Carter
1:04:49
The point is, let's
Carter
1:04:51
let's make it 3%. So what we have, though, is, again, growing unemployment, not reducing unemployment. employment. I'd never understood why this government has felt that a teacher's job is less important than a communications manager at an oil and gas company's job.
Zain
1:05:08
Corey, finishes off. Rachel Notley, advice to her and her party and her team after seeing what you've called a bit of a Frankenstein or a budget of two tails. What do you pick apart? What are you picking on?
Corey
1:05:22
Well, lives and livelihoods, this theme that the government's picked is not not wrong in the sense that these are the big anxieties that people have in the province of alberta they're worried about jobs they're worried about health i don't think that's very different from everywhere else right now but that's ultimately the ground that you need to win on and there are ndp ways to have that conversation i i just fundamentally am less convinced that there needs to be like this big ndp economy plan but i do think there needs to be a plan and if i'm rachel notley i
Corey
1:05:51
i i think what i say first is and foremost is i knock down the other one and i say about the UCP budget, this isn't a plan. This is a plea for help. They are completely lost, and we will be lost too if we stay on this path. Look at where they're cutting. Look at the things that they are not investing in. Look at what they're spending on. Does this look like a path out of the morass that we're in right now? Alberta's future requires a different type of thinking. And I think I use the phrase Alberta's future intentionally because that's the name of this initiative the NDP has going on right now. I think you've got to take that. You've got to to make it clear so what i would do is almost not quite like let me let me just hedge a little bit and say i'm not suggesting you create a red book like in 1993 the liberals had that depth of policy but i would make clear you've got that depth of thinking behind a very clear simple plan albertans can wrap their heads around that they truly believe will result in jobs um and a lot of jobs so it can't be like we're going to invest in this one company to get 300 jobs it's got to be you know stepwise something more significant some hope for the future of alberta some reason for young people to stay here and try to create something new here some reason for parents to tough it out to retirement as their kids grow up because how many years behind can we afford to be
Corey
1:07:09
if we are in year what we're coming into year seven of this recession i
Corey
1:07:15
think every albertan right now has lament for not starting certain actions seven years earlier. And we may disagree as to what that lament is. But ultimately, right now, this sense of lost time is gnawing at this province and that sense of urgency and that sense of need for a plan. And then the delivery of a plan that you can look at and say that makes sense that looks better than what we're getting right now. That's the imperative for the NDP.
Zain
1:07:39
We'll leave that deep dive there and move it on to our final segment are over under our lightning round. Stephen Carter, are you ready? yes
Zain
1:07:47
overrated underrated budget speeches overrated
Carter
1:07:50
overrated i think that ultimately the analysis doesn't govern the speech and the analysis weighs more than the speech itself cory
Zain
1:07:58
cory same question to you overrated or underrated budget speeches depends
Corey
1:08:02
depends on depends on the moment um let me make a case for both because i like to not answer your questions and we are not a
Zain
1:08:10
a place for nuance this This is where Stephen thrives, okay? This is why we have Stephen on the podcast. Go ahead, Corey.
Corey
1:08:15
They can be very underrated if the premier's office has been heavily involved in them and if they are the attempt to tell the story of the government, right? Because they sweat the words, they sweat what's in it, they sweat what's out of it.
Corey
1:08:28
They're very overrated if they've just been written by TBF or by the minister and then they go out and they're just the bow on top of everything. thing so understanding better what kind of import the
Corey
1:08:40
the premier's office puts on it that's necessary to answer that question cory
Zain
1:08:43
cory i'm going to stick with you overrated or underrated the budget communication products that come out um
Corey
1:08:51
um overrated people overthink them ultimately the budget has a fairly limited audience i guess it really depends on what you mean by budget communications products I
Zain
1:09:00
I mean, let me be more specific. The microsites, the videos, the Twitter
Zain
1:09:06
cards, all that stuff.
Corey
1:09:08
I think that when we start getting into more of that broadcast stuff, where it's more push messaging, unless I'm going to go to this website and get it, it matters an awful lot more. But when it comes to the actual materials, it is a fairly limited audience. It is an influential audience, but it's a fairly limited audience. Carter,
Zain
1:09:25
Carter, overrated or underrated budget communications products? products?
Carter
1:09:30
I think it's underrated when you're telling a good story. It is a great opportunity to tell everybody what you're going to do. In fact, governments launch their election campaigns off of budgets frequently. I believe that's what the federal government wants to do. Launch on a budget, carry through the election. That's the beginning of their story. We did that in 2012. It almost killed us. But the story, if you're telling the right one, I think it can be can be very powerful um so i'd say that it's underrated card
Zain
1:10:02
card i'm going to stick with you overrated or underrated real-time budget analysis i
Carter
1:10:09
think it's overrated man like it's going to take time to figure out how people thank you for listening
Carter
1:10:14
yeah like it's really hard like you're asking us even questions about the specifics on the on the budget and cory and i happen to know a lot because we're geniuses obviously but um you know it's hard to read I don't know if anybody's ever delved through an entire budget presentation. We're talking hundreds
Carter
1:10:31
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of information with data on every page that is difficult to figure out the better of. Like I'm looking at social housing and I see a $70 million cut in the capital program and a $30 million cut in the operations. But I'm not sure that that wasn't moved to a different responsibility. It wasn't a grant that's going to be given to a not-for-profit agency, right? Like, there's the shifting
Carter
1:10:58
shifting of these responsibilities. It takes time to analyze this properly, and I'd say we really won't have a sense of this for a little while.
Zain
1:11:07
Corey, overrated, underrated, real-time budget analysis.
Corey
1:11:12
Stephen's absolutely right that it takes a long time to understand what the budget is actually about. out. But it is important because when a budget gets defined, it can be hard to shake that definition. This is not something that people are going to be talking about and thinking about by and large over the next several weeks. And so you want that first impression to stick. And for that first impression to be favorable, you need the analysis to be favorable. So I would say it is underrated. Now, there are expensive ways you can make up for a kind of a halting start out of the the gate, mostly involve buying
Corey
1:11:43
buying a ton of ads and reinforcing the message. Sometimes that's absolutely necessary if you're picking fights with many, many stakeholders in your budget, because they're just going to use their airtime bit by bit and kind of make you feel pain. But that analysis is worth its weight in gold, for sure.
Zain
1:12:01
Corey, budget 2021, was it more Craig Kielberger or Mark Kielberger? i
Corey
1:12:09
think it was more mark kielberger he's the lawyer right like he uh you know there was a certain parsing that was involved in it um it uh it
Corey
1:12:18
it wasn't poetry that's i think craig's specialty so i'm gonna say this is mark with no slight to mark uh
Zain
1:12:24
uh steven carter budget 2021 was it more craig kielberger or mark kielberger well
Carter
1:12:30
well it had no flash and no pizzazz so it couldn't be craig so it must be Mark.
Zain
1:12:37
Nicely done. Nicely done. And final question, Stephen Carter, the most important question.
Zain
1:12:42
Is it a flex if it's true?
Carter
1:12:44
It is not a flex if it's true. Okay,
Zain
1:12:46
Okay, that's correct. That is correct answer. Corey, you've given us that answer so I've got another question for you to wrap it up. Will you be reading
Zain
1:12:53
Hillary Clinton's new thriller?
Zain
1:12:55
Will you be reading
Corey
1:12:57
No. Is it an erotic thriller? Oh,
Carter
1:12:59
Oh, it's got to be. Neurotic or erotic? That's a wrap. Okay, okay. I know
Zain
1:13:03
subjects I don't get into. That's a wrap on episode 919 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Belgey. With me, as always, Corey Hogan, Stephen Carter, and we'll see you next time.