Episode 944: Eleven questions and no answers

Zain 0:02

This is The Strategist, episode 944. My name is Zain Velji. With me, as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, we are at a Thursday, and the election is on a Monday.

Zain 0:16

it was a test. I didn't know that was an ask-and-answer part of

Zain 0:20

show. No, it was an ask-and-answer part of the show. Most of these are ask-and-answer structured shows. That's a fair point. And since

Zain 0:27

since I saw no answer, I thought I would jump in.

Carter 0:30

in. Usually you go on with a seven or eight minute question and then I lose focus and then I just answer whatever I want to answer anyways. That

Corey 0:37

That does sound more like what I do, too, to be honest.

Zain 0:39

It's adding insight through the moderator's chair, which is a rarity. But it is something I do. It is something I do. I

Carter 0:46

I saw that work really well in the federal debate.

Zain 0:51

we could all we could all learn something from federal from the federal leaders debate uh cory uh you probably were taught a leader from the federal's uh federal leaders debates in terms of brevity today uh i'm sure uh as you uh appeared on the cbc for either it was either 30 seconds or 12 minutes and i don't know how to calculate it it's

Corey 1:11

it's a very complicated calculation it was uh it was a panel and uh one of the panelists really did not want to let go of the joystick i think That's the way I would put it. And it wasn't me for once. I

Carter 1:21

was just going to say, this is my life on this fucking show. It's an upsetting

Corey 1:24

upsetting panel where there's four people and I'm the person who talks the least. I just need to put that

Carter 1:30

that out there. I can't even believe that that's true. Do you know what the

Corey 1:31

the problem is? Is

Zain 1:32

Is that they've got producers there and they produce the show versus we've got a free range, deep dive, exploration into anything. Like right now, you could say anything you want and I'm giving you the space to do it.

Zain 1:45

Okay, that sounds great. Thank you, Corey.

Corey 1:47

Corey. I really do

Zain 1:48

No, that's good. Anything else we want to get off the front end before we jump into it, Stephen Carter? Because it's not like we've got an election on Monday.

Carter 1:58

No, there's nothing really happening.

Zain 2:01

I'm doing a momentum

Carter 2:02

momentum shift. I don't know. Was it a shift? Did anybody notice? I don't know. What's going on?

Zain 2:07

Okay, good. Thank you for scooping the entire show. Yeah.

Carter 2:12

You're welcome. I'm here for you.

Corey 2:15

uh carter had some comments

Corey 2:18

comments about momentum shift i guess yeah momentum shift is something

Zain 2:21

something we're gonna move it on to our first segment can

Zain 2:24

can he do it yes he can guys jason kenny has successfully done it he has successfully fucked his buddy we were waiting for this it is the i just why are you such a cliche jason why are you such a cliche guys we're going to talk talk about Alberta, our home province. We're going to start here. We're going to see where this goes. This is becoming the national story of this election, at least in this endgame last four days that we are seeing. Corey, maybe since you didn't get the time to fully peacock your feathers on the CBC, which

Zain 3:00

which is both an NBC and CBC reference, so you're welcome. That's really nice. I bring it. I bring it every time, Carter. Corey, do you want to set the stage? Set the the stage for our listeners that are joining us from across the country in terms of how Alberta, and maybe let's start from the July 1 open for summer, greatest summer ever, perhaps even throw in your analogy that you used in the past, which I think is so apt, and then drive us to where we are right now in this fourth wave and the response we saw from our premier last night, Wednesday night here in Calgary. Can I ask you to take on that task?

Corey 3:37

Yeah, sure. I'm happy to do so because because I'm a consummate professional, and I can fill time with the best of them. I'll let the CDC know.

Corey 3:45

Thank you. The province of Alberta, as

Corey 3:48

as I think most people know, decided to be really quite aggressive about opening for summer, open for summer. The government had ads everywhere and reduced the restrictions very rapidly after the end of the third wave, as we saw the number of cases declined sharply due to an increase Increase in vaccinations, the fact that we had masking, all of those good things that have kept us safe from COVID-19. And, and it really did seem like it was driven by a, it was driven by a desire to have the Calgary Stampede. Carter, do you think you could type louder for our listeners here? I'm just, I'm just curious. I'm

Carter 4:26

I'm taking notes I

Carter 4:29

want to make sure to address the stampede point I

Zain 4:32

I 100% guarantee you are not taking notes I

Carter 4:35

I am taking notes what is Corey saying oh

Zain 4:38

oh my god read

Zain 4:39

read those notes back 100

Carter 4:40

100% designed to reopen the Calgary stampede okay

Corey 4:48

okay well hit that mute button baby I'm

Carter 4:50

I'm going to type louder now this is what I put up with every show from you you always are typing and i'm always listening to you pound your keyboard that's

Carter 4:59

that's not a euphemism either all

Corey 5:04

right circling back to alberta um lost the plot a little bit just like uh like the good province and what happened was uh we we just opened up very rapidly in order to not have any restrictions for the greatest outdoor show on earth the calgary stampede and this uh best Best summer ever advertising and branding that the province put on was accompanied with some very braggadocious and grand language from the premier, making statements like, we're not just open for summer, we're open for good. Good.

Corey 5:36

The idea that anybody would have concerns about this was seen as kind of like just fear and naysayers and don't even worry about it.

Corey 5:47

Well, I mean, there were all sorts of adjectives thrown around by the premier and also by some of the people around the premier. At the time, this is what Zane was talking about. I

Corey 5:57

I described it as it's like driving way too fast down a windy mountain road. You know, they're looking at it and they're saying, we'll probably make it. But, you know, it's not necessarily a smart idea. It's very risky. And I think what we saw over the course of the summer was, yeah, it was risky and the downside came to be. And even at the time when we talked about it, we said, wow, he's really going all in on this. He's absolutely, you know, screwed if we end up in a really bad fourth wave. And well, here we are over the course of the start of August. And I guess I should mention at one point, the province was even going to just end contact tracing. seen yeah

Corey 6:34

it was pandemics over we're now in an endemic phase you didn't even necessarily well you didn't need to lock down if you had covid was the plan by mid-august but then all of a sudden the numbers started wrapping really uh ramping really highly uh they they pulled back those plans i think they'd like us all to forget that that was at the you know at one point the plan here in alberta and it's just gone up and up and up and up and as i think most canadians know by now Now, we're out of ICU space. We're way over our base. The hospitals are full. Obviously, we're dealing with the same protests at hospitals as everybody else is. It just feels like the sky is falling. And even

Corey 7:13

even though this was really obvious for weeks, the premier disappeared. The premier's cabinet disappeared. Our chief medical officer of health disappeared. And the assumption is that's because of a combination of not wanting to deal with what was an ugly situation, but not an inevitable situation yet, and wanting to stay low during a federal election to help the Conservative Party of Canada.

Corey 7:38

So fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, Jason Kenney announces some new restrictions in the province of Alberta, masking, right? And the idea that you can't drink after 10, thus moving all of the drinking hours earlier in the day, as far as I could tell, but not having a significant impact. Cases continue to pile up, cases continue to pile up, It's also when he announced

Zain 7:58

announced the $100 incentive

Zain 8:00

incentive as well, the $100 to, you know, the carrot for those who had not, yeah.

Corey 8:07

It just had as much effect on me here as it did to people in the moment. Yeah, fair. We didn't see an increase in vaccination rates. And so, crisis time.

Corey 8:16

The Premier of Alberta yesterday stands up at a microphone and announces, well,

Corey 8:22

well, I don't even know. I mean, it was very confusing. using. And I think that Albertans are still trying to figure it out. The pith of it is everything's in lockdown unless you use a vaccine passport system, and in which case you are allowed to open your business up again. But the frustration is now businesses have to make the choice about which of their customers they want to antagonize. Obviously, the vast majority of Albertans are supportive of vaccine passports, 80% or so. But that 20% can be pretty loud and pretty annoying. And so I think they would have preferred if the government just told them they had to do it.

Zain 8:53

And took the leadership, yeah. Absolutely.

Corey 8:54

Absolutely. The passport, such as it is, is called the Restriction Exemption Program. It's just a confusing sort of mess of alternatives here that have been thrown at people. And I don't know, Zane, I could go further, but this is already an awful lot.

Corey 9:10

lot. This is good context. I'm going to throw it

Zain 9:11

it over to Carter. So at the end of the day, what we have, and Corey, thank you for this, I should say, is a province that has reacted Carter too late, that has started with some too little, too late measures a couple weeks ago, too little, too late and outright boneheaded. Maybe I'll clarify measures with a hundred dollar gift card. Now is introduced a blanket set of restrictions that go into effect on Monday. Announced them. Let's well, and we'll get to the timing in a second in the in the federal sort of election ramifications. Carter, let's stick to Alberta for now and talk about this a bit more. And for our listeners, maybe outside of the province, can you add the politics? Can you give us a sense of the politics of wanting to be the first to open, let's start where Corey started his story, all the way to perhaps the dithering and the lack of response and perhaps absence leading up to yesterday, which is still considered by many, based on other jurisdictions, a half measure. So give us a sense of the politics and analyst mode before we get into the strategy side of things a little bit further on.

Carter 10:17

Three words, governing by ideology, right?

Carter 10:21

right? When you bring your ideology and you put your ideology at the forefront, you begin to govern that way. So the ideology was, we want business to flourish. The only way the business can flourish is if we reopen. This is what drove everything. The business cycle was accentuated by the Calgary Stampede. The Calgary Stampede was the thing that people jumped in on, and he tried to focus it in, and he didn't put any pragmatic checks and balances in. This was not a decision based on numbers. This was not a decision. None of these decisions have been based on analysis. If you were doing numbers and analysis, you would... Jesus Christ, Tolkien.

Carter 11:00

If you were doing numbers...

Corey 11:03

Just taking some notes here. They're

Carter 11:04

They're good notes because if you're doing... If you were doing... If you were...

Carter 11:10

I'm not losing my temper today. Today is the day I'm not losing my temper. So I think that the fact that this can't, that Jason

Carter 11:20

Jason Kenney's approached this as though he could solve the problem by using his ideology instead of by using his data

Carter 11:27

data and the information coming from people. And I'm going to use one data point. Well, I'm going to use two data points. First of all, we were the first to reopen.

Carter 11:35

Things weren't great when we opened. We reopened better, faster than anybody else. And we took a chance. and then when we were open we were also the last to respond to the actual fourth wave this has been going on in alberta for weeks i would say at least six weeks more likely eight to ten weeks depending on where you want to start when we should have noticed we noticed right away we noticed right after the stampede that all of a sudden the numbers were going back up again and people made excuses and those excuses were all based on ideology they weren't based on actual evidence and actual understanding of what was happening. And when you do that, you no longer govern. And instead, you become a dictatorial type of an organization that's just pretending things to be the way that they wish. And you're no better than any other tin pot dictator. And that's what this man has become. He's a tin pot leader who, even today, even today on his Facebook Live, he's doing a Facebook Live where he's addressing all of the Albertans. And this is how he chooses to address us directly. And in the background of the shot, there's a victory Calgary stampede pennant.

Carter 12:46

This is a man who's small. This is a man who's tiny. This is a man who believes that everything he has done to this point is good and it costs people's lives.

Carter 12:55

that's really impossible for me to just to kind of summarize, Zane. It has all been done out of pettiness. Even today's communications are done out of pettiness. He apologized yesterday for 30 seconds and then was asked again, so are you apologizing for this? No, I'm not. I'm not apologizing. I don't apologize.

Carter 13:14

Well, what do you say to the families? Have you picked up the phone? Have you talked to one of the families that lost someone? Have you talked to the people that put their child under five in ICU this week? Have you talked to them? Have you talked to the people that have kids in schools? He's completely isolated from real-world activities, And as a result, he is governing like a fucking madman. I'm not angry.

Zain 13:40

Corey, I want to get the politics ironed out, because this is super important to the downstream ramifications for not just what happens here, but also the federal side of things. So give me your take. Do you agree with Carter that, and Carter, I know there was a very impassioned, you know, plea at the end. But the headline that, if I can summarize, was politics by ideology or governing by ideology. Corey, do you agree that that is what's led to wanting to be the first to open up, perhaps dithering and delaying, and seeing this pattern that we have seen with the premier now in our fourth province-wide state of health emergency?

Corey 14:19

No, I don't. I think it is more about expediency. And I'll give you a metaphor.

Corey 14:26

Because you got to keep in mind how not great things were for Jason Kenney going into the summer. We had had UCP caucus members ejected, including their caucus chair. We had cabinet ministers speaking out against the things that the premier had been doing. Obviously, he had lost his chief of staff earlier in the year. The UCP had been trailing the NDP in the polls for, I don't know, eight months at that point.

Corey 14:52

So think of him like a gambler down thousands. Knows if he goes home, his wife is going to kill him. Everything's gone wrong for him to that point. But then he thinks, here's a great bet. Here's the sure thing that's been offered to me. 90% chance. I bet $100,000 here. I win $10,000. I am out of the red. I'm ready to move on. So rather than taking his

Corey 15:11

his lumps and just leaving the fucking casino, what happens is instead, there's this betting of an amount that he cannot afford to lose, right? He only saw the day in front of him. And he thought, okay, this is probably going to work out for me and I can win this day. But in winning the day, he risks having lost everything.

Corey 15:29

everything. everything and i think that's the true political story here it's a story of tactics overwhelming strategy and i said this on west of center last week but i think it's worth repeating here when you're in government and

Corey 15:41

and this is different from being an opposition and

Corey 15:44

and it's different from being the pit bull in a government too which in in many situations jason kenney was asked to do in a past life when you are in government when you are leading a government part of your job is always always keeping one eye on the exits right you no matter what you're doing in the room you need to think about how you exit that room you avoid absolute statements you absolutely avoid absolute statements how's that yeah

Zain 16:07

yeah that's good and that's good cory we saw it we all noticed thank you good

Corey 16:10

good all right and um and you want to make sure you're thinking about what happens if i'm wrong what if there's plan b and even though you think there's two doors here it's

Corey 16:19

it's never either door you know The Kool-Aid man smashes through the wall every fucking time. So you've got to be thinking about how you back out of policy situations always, right? And that might sound cynical and like you're thinking you're going to fail. It's an acknowledgment that a day in government is a day that's going to end different than it started, always.

Corey 16:39

always. And Jason Kenney didn't really appreciate that. The problem was when we got into August, he just seemed to be doubling down on those bets. He just disappeared. disappeared. And once again, I think he started thinking about politics in a small sense instead of a big sense. How do I make sure that I don't, you know, I would be so mad if the liberals came and tried to stick the CPC with this, so I'm just going to disappear.

Corey 17:03

Okay, you disappeared while there was a pandemic going on in your province, my man. You know, the province that you lead.

Corey 17:10

Do you really think that that's a long-term strategic successful move here? And Albertans are just having none of it. They're just having none of it. They're so done.

Corey 17:18

And that frustration and the chaos that has come from that lack of action over the past couple of months has fueled an absolute shitstorm that

Corey 17:26

is now spilling into the national campaign. Carter,

Zain 17:29

Carter, you know, one of the added elements, I'm gonna let you jump in here, right, is what is now, you know, table stakes when we discuss Alberta politics and the UCP caucus is that he's trying to thread that needle, right? The balance between, you know, the urban and the rural, the PC and the Wild Rose, the fact that this is gluing together of two parties in terms of what he did with the UCP. I also want to add that context in before I get you to respond to what Corey said. You know, you talked about governing by ideology. He talks about expediency. The question, Carter, to you is, can you reconcile those two things? And is it a combination of those two things in your mind that perhaps is what's happening here?

Carter 18:06

You know what? Corey might be right. I might be right. The only thing we know for sure is what he didn't do. And what he didn't do was governed by what is right and what is wrong, right?

Carter 18:16

right? Because there were better decisions that could have been made and and even today he's on his facebook live and he's defending himself saying that we made the best decisions the best decisions i mean this is this is the equivalent of listening to donald trump right we are just listening to donald trump he's just his name is now jason kenney he's trying to gaslight us and say we put the appropriate constraints in during the summer now both of you guys live in alberta i live in alberta what constraints existed during Because I'm

Carter 18:45

I'm not aware of any. I'm

Carter 18:46

I'm not aware of any constraints. There was no mask use. There was no restriction on how many people could be in a house. There's no restriction in who could be in a restaurant. He is now saying we put constraints in place over the summer. That's just a simple lie. you

Carter 19:00

you know and so my problem with with all of this is

Carter 19:04

doing what was right doing

Carter 19:06

doing what was right doing what rectifying a mistake understanding that which was wrong none of that has actually factored into the decision making right

Carter 19:15

right so even now even today we're about to send albertans to ontario ontario and has has kindly offered to take um some of our intensive care patients um that's

Carter 19:27

that's very kind of them. But that

Carter 19:30

that is an offer that he's not even really acknowledging. He's not even saying that this is a mistake that has now put us in this place where we have to send people from Alberta to Ontario for treatment. He's making this out like this is in some fashion normal or in some fashion the result of people not getting vaccinated. Yes, of course, it's the result of people not getting vaccinated. But I'll tell you something, you put this vaccine passport in place in june or in july all of a sudden people get vaccinated a lot faster you know how many people got vaccinated in the province of alberta this today 25 000 people got vaccinated in the province of alberta today 9 000 got vaccinated yesterday right

Carter 20:07

right put the the stick in place how many times do we talk about this cory this is not the first time we're talking about this how many times were we livid about this how many times were we angry about this every time is the answer and now we're are beyond angry. We're beyond upset. I mean, I've got a kid that didn't go to school today, right? I've got a kid that's supposed to be working, and all of the people that she's working with are saying, well, thank God we don't need to get vaccinated because we're staff. This is the type of rules that we've got in place. The staff at the restaurant that you have to produce a passport to go into don't need to be vaccinated themselves, right?

Carter 20:45

right? The rules are are so screwed up the rules like so let me just give you an example zane let me give you another

Carter 20:52

another example because i want people to understand because people who aren't in this fucking hellhole don't understand if

Carter 20:57

if we had to cancel we had a volunteer meeting today uh

Carter 21:01

uh for the campaign that i'm working on we had a volunteer we had to move it to a virtual meeting because the the precautions that we have in place everybody must be double vaccinated and present a passport for double vaccination and they have to wear masks in in the facility those precautions weren't good enough because the rules you said the rules come into place actually on the 20th of september you're incorrect there the rules are in place no

Carter 21:25

no they are in place right fucking now

Carter 21:27

the exemptions start on the 20th so the rules right are in place today and the rules fucked me today the rules made sure that that I couldn't do what I wanted to do. But on the 20th of September, if I used the exact same protocols that I would have used today,

Carter 21:44

I'd be able to do it.

Carter 21:45

This is how fucked up our government is. They don't even understand the implication or the impact of the decisions that they made. I went for coffee today. I shouldn't have been able to go for the coffee today because I broke the rules today. But yesterday would have been fine. And on Monday, it'll be fine. This

Carter 22:03

This is how fucked up our government is. They're hurting businesses. and they're hurting people.

Carter 22:09

And on top of that, I'm not even sure. I mean, I think it's going to work. I think that three weeks from now, maybe we're talking about a turnaround, but it's not going to work fast enough. And it certainly wasn't implemented fast enough.

Zain 22:19

Corey, talk to me about Carter, you're on a wavelength that I actually want to stay on for a bit. Corey, talk to me about these restrictions. They seem to be restrictions written by committee, or restrictions written by a lot of input. You know, certain, whether it's words that they're trying to avoid using certain constituencies and folks that they're trying to appease. Walk me through with your Alberta political history and campaign strategy hat, knowing what, you know, broadly that UCP caucus looks like. What do you see from these restrictions? And what do they kind of say about the political dynamic that Jason Kenney's trying to, I hate to use this word because he's doing it unsuccessfully, balance. Yeah,

Corey 23:03

Yeah, I think that you hit the nail on the head when you say it's restrictions built by committee. It definitely feels like there are competing visions for what this should be that are resting within the policy that the government of Alberta threw out there, and they are trying to fix it with communications. And they have broken their brains in the process because none of it holds together anymore. And as they're talking about it, just this word salad ballot comes out and you know i guarantee you everybody who was watching the news conference yesterday would not know what the state of play was right now were it not for the fact that they could then go and look at a website after and try to decipher it and try to figure it out and i can guarantee that because they actually contradicted themselves at different points in it and we don't need to get into it but one of them was around distancing for example two meters was that just for the moment was that included in the vaccine thing a lot of a lot of unclarity on this ultimately what they brought out zane was

Corey 23:56

was and the way they tried to package it was we're going back into lockdown yeah

Corey 24:00

lockdown is back the situation's terrible it's because of the unvaccinated and so you're going to have restrictions on who you can see socially restrictions on movement indoors you must have two meters distance it is required that you work from home now unless you're needed to be there for operational efficiency and um and

Corey 24:18

and i don't know there's a whole bunch of other ones there. And then for most of them, there's also weird exemptions for them. Even before we get to the mother of all exemptions, which is instead of just saying, or you can have a vaccine passport, right? They've said, now we have all of these restrictions, but we have this restriction exemption program, which is, by the way, not a good name in addition to being confusing. It really sounds unsafe. Like if you are an employer and you're sitting there saying, I'm going to tell all of my staff that they can come back to work under the restriction exemption program it actually sounds like you're putting them in an unsafe situation right but they were so desperate to make it seem like i

Corey 24:55

i i don't even know and so so desperate to maybe not use the

Corey 25:00

yeah yeah they wanted to avoid vaccine passports so desperately they came up with something substantially worse right and uh so the restriction exemption program such as it is called allows you starting monday if

Corey 25:13

if a business opts in because everything's on their lockdown unless you business decide you don't want to be under lockdown in which case you can enter the restriction exemption program where you have to check for proof of vaccination or proof of a recent rapid test or pcr test to see if somebody's had covet 19 all

Corey 25:29

all of this is confusing and

Corey 25:31

in a private covet test that they oh

Zain 25:32

oh yeah it's private you

Zain 25:34

you can't just go to like ahs or precision labs and be like here's my here's my test i got it done from the government dime no you have to do a private test in order to yeah

Corey 25:43

yeah and i have no problem with that because i i think that we should just be pushing people to restrict. But the point is, it's just, it's really quite difficult to unpack. And Stephen's right, like there's this weird hole that they created for four days, too, where we are subject to the restrictions, but we don't have the exemption process.

Corey 26:01

I mean, I won't tell you the stories from my own professional career, but it's been brutal. It's just been absolutely brutal on anybody who's a large employer in the last 24 four hours carter

Zain 26:12

carter you add the history of jason kenny expediency governing by ideology maybe a combination of two of those two things you add the the pressure cooker that has been this province prior to during the pandemic the rage the hate and this is covid's one of the files i mean we haven't even gotten into the multi-front war jason kenny has been fighting prior to this And then you hit last night with that press conference. Let's go to today, because today, Jason Kenney's ramifications, the blast zone of Alberta in this election really made itself present. We talk about Alberta's impact being negligible with the seats that we have here. here. Carter, I think it's safe to say that Alberta's impact, as Corey has said many times on this podcast, and I believe you have as well, is less about the seats, more about the issues. And here we are, Carter, endgame, Aaron O'Toole. Did Jason Kenney just play fuck his buddy to Aaron O'Toole announcing this on a Wednesday night, digested by the entire country on Thursday? I look at National News Watch right now to what Corey pointed us to. Six stories at the top, Top five of them are about this province. This is defining O'Toole in many ways, at least from the way I see it.

Zain 27:26

Does this screw O'Toole, Carter?

Carter 27:29

Let me back up a little bit here. So here's the interesting question. We've already established that the when is actually the most important element of yesterday. Yesterday, the why then, right? Why do you have to do it then? I'm glad you're going here. Good. If you hold on for five more days, you're not going to have this impact with O'Toole, right? If you do

Zain 27:50

do this— Till Tuesday. Till Tuesday. That's all you've got to wait for. Five

Carter 27:53

Five more days. That's all we're asking for. You know, in the O'Toole land, he's like, please, just wait. Tell you what, you can do it on election night at 7.38. That's fine. We can do it then. All of that is available to him. Just wait a few more days. Or, conversely, act three weeks earlier, right? Right. Act three weeks earlier. You know, all of a sudden, O'Toole's got the ability to deal with this. Maybe Trudeau fucks it up. You know, like there's a bunch of different opportunities that are in place. Why? Why yesterday?

Carter 28:23

And I'll be honest with you, it's a question I don't have the answer to. The other person, the other person who doesn't have that answer, the other person who's 100 percent certain he does not have a clue why Jason Getty did it yesterday is

Carter 28:36

Aaron O'Toole is running around the country being chased by every reporter saying, do you still stand by your quote that said the best response in the country was Jason Kenney? Do you stand by that quote? He was asked 11 times. 11 times he has asked that question today.

Carter 28:52

Zero answers. And I'll tell you something, that should be a simple question. Yes, I do. No, I don't.

Carter 28:58

No, I do not. I think, you know, at the time, I thought he was doing the right thing. but hindsight is 20 20 and now i can see that he was wrong that

Carter 29:06

that should be that's an answer

Carter 29:08

but instead he's running around and he's not answering the question and i'll tell you something if you're four days five days out from election and you're not answering the question you are losing ground you're losing ground massively because you've lost forget about not answering the question all of us never answered the question zane i don't believe i've answered one of your questions tonight but it's the ability to be perceived as answering the question that is is really important. And Aaron O'Toole has lost that ability because Jason Kenney, his good friend has completely fucked him. And that to me is the part that I'm just baffled by. And I don't have the answer to the question.

Zain 29:44

Hold on, Carter. You've unpacked a lot here. You've talked about timing. You've talked about what the responses are. I'm getting to all of it. Corey, I want to get a

Zain 29:53

a decent piece of analysis in terms of why this screws Aaron O'Toole. Is it the timing of when it happened, to Carter's point? Because if you lay it out in elemental form and be charitable to Jason Kenney, which

Zain 30:08

which is hard to do, but you do it for a second, he comes out, is trying to help the situation. Why does that make this shitty for Aaron O'Toole? Explain to us, perhaps underline to to us why this is a liability and why this is shitty for for aaron o'toole today and then let's please get to the other questions because i do want to get there carter well

Corey 30:29

well the simple answer is because those two have been tied closely on on many issues but even this issue now interestingly enough aaron o'toole made those comments i remember when he made them and

Corey 30:39

it was in the start of the second wave um it was the fall and at the time it looked like it and i think it's still the time we had the most deaths in alberta like we were it was looking pretty grim i might might be wrong about that. But either way, it was, it was comments that already didn't seem accurate. But it did seem that those comments were maybe based on stale data, because Alberta did really well in the first wave, especially relative to people dying in nursing homes in Quebec and in comparable situations. So I always felt like in some ways, Aaron O'Toole needs to update his briefing materials more regularly when he made that comment. But the

Corey 31:17

fact that he made that comment. The fact that he's been to Alberta, the fact that he stood in front of the legislature and said, let's take Canada back, that he stood with Jason Kenney, who endorsed him for leader of the CPC, that's the challenge for him. It makes them a little bit closer. And I'm sure the liberals would really like a conflating of the two positions, right? And certainly Aaron O'Toole has done everything to support that, up to and including not answering a question that was apparently asked of him 11 times it would be i think smart if he had said no i don't i made those comments at a very different time alberta did very well in the first wave right

Corey 31:54

that's that's what i would have said the first time and i would have been done with it and jason kenney would have been mad and like who cares

Corey 32:04

um because right now it is it is starting to chew up the limited cycles that are left of aaron o'toole's campaign, with people dogging him with this question and saying, what would this mean if Aaron O'Toole had been prime minister? And that's a weird question to me, can I just say as an aside, because Justin Trudeau is the prime minister, and this happened. So to suggest that this is an example of a worst case scenario under Aaron O'Toole, this

SPEAKER_00 32:28

this is a worst case scenario under Justin Trudeau that's

Corey 32:31

that's happening right now. This is an actual case scenario that's happening under Justin Trudeau. But...

Zain 32:35

But... Oh, that's pretty funny. but

Corey 32:37

but i the problem is they are seen as two peas in an ideological pod to to carter's points earlier about ideology so the problem is simply that some people will blur the two together it

Corey 32:48

it may actually be a worse problem for him in alberta than

Corey 32:52

than in the rest of canada i don't know it's obviously consuming national media right now there's a reason that both you and i were on cbc today right oh

Carter 33:01

oh just rub it in just rub it in don't worry buddy salt in my mouth someday 35

Zain 33:05

35 seconds it's worth it carter you'll get you'll get the you'll

Zain 33:10

you'll get the cory glory one day it'll happen to you uh but cory no this is okay fair point i want you to touch on carter's point there that he introduced so i can round both of you out on it which is what would have the optimal timing have been for otulo cory do you agree three weeks

Zain 33:25

three weeks ago or after

Corey 33:27

after so this is the Okay, well, this is again, I think it's a pattern of behavior with the UCP, which is our

Corey 33:34

our ship is going to come in, just give it another day. Let's just try to get lucky. They're just consummate gamblers. I use that analogy very

Corey 33:41

very intentionally. And they're just thinking, this

Corey 33:44

this is the political behavior of kiting checks, right? Just in another couple days, maybe I can figure this all out. We can unravel all of this in a way that doesn't screw everything. everything and he i know why he did it yesterday i think it's pretty simple he held on for as long as he couldn't he couldn't hold on a day longer tell me what you mean by hold on all right

Corey 34:02

right he didn't he didn't make these these calls on these various policies that needed to be brought in the province of alberta because he didn't want it to be an election campaign but every day he held on he actually made it a worse election problem to steven's point which just upped his desire not to do it and then all of a sudden the icu beds are full in alberta and we are literally i mean mean we call it triage it's system collapse the health care system is collapsing in the province of alberta i might be using future tense rather inaccurately in fact yeah so so

Corey 34:32

so like there's there's just no more time the situation is too dire it doesn't matter right now if it screws there are no tools campaign but can i say well i'll save that for later carter this

Zain 34:41

is interesting carter on this point though and cory talks about system collapse and you know i'll add some context to that from news stories that come out today, that Alberta is striking deals with Ontario and Quebec to have assistance with health care workers and ICU functionality. But Carter, to this question that Corey's put on the table, I need to ask you in a parallel universe. If Jason Kenney does not show up last night, Wednesday night, if Jason Kenney doesn't give that 6 p.m. news conference, if he just sits on his hands until Tuesday, says, fuck it, it's going to be the federal election, People in Alberta will be mad with me. What's different? Does that actually make it worse than the situation is right now for O'Toole?

Carter 35:20

I don't think so. I

Carter 35:21

I mean, I think that it would be equally bad right now for O'Toole. Maybe not equally bad. I actually think it might be a bit better for O'Toole. And if I'm honest, I'm not sure how much better Jason Kenney made it for himself. If he holds off and does this on the 21st of September or the 22nd of September,

Carter 35:38

frankly, there'll be more dead people. Well, there's going to be more dead people anyways. You know, the schools would will be exploding. Schools are going to explode anyways. All of the things that are going to that are bad that are going to happen by next week are still going to happen by next week. He would have put off the recovery for five or six days. But frankly, he's put off the recovery from this situation for over six weeks. He's put off the recovery from this since we all spotted that, hey, after Stampede, things don't look that good. And he declared that Stampede was great. I seem to recall Alberta Health Services and the people associated with, you know, health care in the province of Alberta saying the stampede was fine. We didn't have any problems with stampede. Well, OK, maybe the stampede was fine. I don't know. I'm not here to I'm not here to trace everything back. But it feels like things aren't great. And it feels like that was a catalytic moment where things started to take hold. So I don't know. Who cares if it's another five days? I mean, at this point, I really am asking the question, why didn't he wait? i mean cory's right the right time to do this was a minimum of three weeks ago right ideally this would happen just before the writ was dropped because i'll tell you something two days after the writ is dropped no one's going to remember this situation um we're in the middle of summer you know cory's workplace doesn't have this issue people weren't thinking they'd get back to work september 1st was a key date and the fucking

Carter 37:04

fucking premier was on vacation If he had done this before September the 1st, even on August the 31st, things would have been markedly different.

Carter 37:14

But he couldn't do that. So now the question has to be, if not then, why now? Why wouldn't you just hold? And if I was Aaron O'Toole, that would be the question I'd be asking Jason Kenney. And frankly, there is no good answer. I mean, is Jason Kenney actually an agent of Rachel Notley, who has been sent to destroy the conservative movement in Canada? One has to ask that. that.

Zain 37:36

Corey, can we can we talk about maybe some of the domestic regional Alberta political issues that could be responsible for Jason Kenney pushing? There's a lot of rumors around the fact that, you know, and I think you're the one who said who said this before, Corey, that we've got a three stage process. Step one, too little too late with the measures. Step two, some sort of caucus response slash quasi revolt. Step three, the right measures or the necessary measures is multiple weeks late. We're now in step two. And perhaps what, you know, led to step one here was the fact that, you know, he wanted to try to minimize the impact of what the caucus or the ministerial sort of blowback could be from his UCP caucus.

Corey 38:22

know, I say this a lot, and I don't say it to be a pain in the ass, but Jason Kenney, if he has a downfall here, and I still believe he's not bad at tactics can i just say and i really do mean this if

Corey 38:34

if you watched yesterday and if you turn off the part of your brain that can remember back more than two weeks it sounded pretty reasonable it didn't sound bad at all you know but the retrospective he provides albertans aren't in the mood for they're not turning off that part of their brain but in he's he can take a moment the problem is he can't see the whole board right he has trouble with the the things that were in the past, and he has problems envisioning what things might be in the future here. And that is a very dangerous situation for a premier to be in. So, you know, I think he's

Corey 39:07

he's got a lot of challenges within his caucus. He's trying to balance them out, but he's trying to balance them out in ways that are too clever by half. And when you kind of step back, it looks like madness, right?

Corey 39:18

right? You've got to take a policy track on here. You can't just win the individual moment and get the consensus in the room to have a policy the province of alberta hates you're just gonna have to side with one side and say yes these are my passport yeah

Corey 39:31

yeah i mean choose who you're going to the dance with here right but to try to hold this very tenuous coalition together is is a difficult task at the best of times and i don't know i mean when

Corey 39:43

when the gods want to punish you they give you what you want and jason kenney is

Corey 39:47

is such a fascinating case study of this right he merges these conservative parties he becomes leader he starts you know pulling it into a very ideological pure direction he puts these very conservative policies in the platform people vote for it it was all right there you know all forget covid i mean there were a lot of very conservative policies that were looking to remake the province that were put out and that were being acted on he has a majority government and it

Corey 40:12

it looked like he was in a position where he could with a free hand bring in this model of right-wing government and thought lot right everything you could possibly ask for and

Corey 40:20

and but if the gods want to punish you they give you what you could ask for and now he's a conservative down in the polls to the ndp in alberta for almost a year he is the least popular premier in the country steven carter is asking did he destroy the conservative movement in alberta he's

Corey 40:36

he's not the only one who's throwing out things like does this the end does this break alberta's love affair with the conservative party and

Corey 40:43

and on on top of it all, he

Corey 40:45

he might send the election to Justin Trudeau, a man he has absolutely no time for.

Zain 40:50

Carter, this seems karmic in some ways for Jason Kenney on a political level. But let's now get into the politics a little bit more federally, right? So you guys both said around O'Toole what he should have said. Carter, what does O'Toole do from here? We're looking at Thursday night, Friday morning. It seems like this question will keep dogging him. Like, if the national media is any indication uh o'toole did cancel a one-on-one appearance with ctv uh and is refusing to reschedule there's rumors that he's hunkering down that he's turtling a bit that they might need to reset carter um this has not been a great week for him in in a few ways we're talking about this we're talking about uh you know picking this this this pc track which we'll talk about in a a second, that he is done. He's bleeding more votes on his right flank. Stephen Carter, what is the O'Toole strategy here after the body blow that your buddy gives you?

Carter 41:48

So you have basically three options, in my mind. One is to try and finish the campaign with no media.

Carter 41:54

That's lunacy, right? Like, there's no way to finish the campaign. What do you mean by that? What do

Zain 41:59

do you mean by that? What

Zain 42:00

What do you mean by no media? You mean just like no more into media no pressers nothing no

Carter 42:05

no i mean they cover the campaign they cover where we go to we're not doing any scrums we're talking to people we talk to the people the people are the people we talk to the people are the people that we care about the

Carter 42:13

people on the media bus we don't give a shit about the media bus the media bus doesn't even exist we

Carter 42:18

we are going to focus on the people the people are the ones that matter the people that i care about and you just you don't do media you

Carter 42:24

you don't put surrogates out you don't put anybody out you just give them the story that they get, which is this is where the tour bus went. This is what he said in the speech. He was not available for comment afterwards.

Zain 42:36

Carter, that's an idiotic strategy for their 36 days. For three days, it seems totally reasonable. Why did you undercut it yourself?

Carter 42:43

Why did I undercut it for myself? Because you said

Zain 42:45

said you can't do that. Why did you? Why did you say that? It sounds actually you're presenting and it doesn't sound insane to me. I don't know, Corey, what you think. Because

Carter 42:52

Because you need the one on ones because you need you need the radio interview interviews you need to be able to show up in a in a regional place and do a regional media now yeah

Carter 43:00

yeah because you're three days out really

Carter 43:02

really three days out you need to this this is everything against the wall time this isn't let's take one of our big tools and take it off the table this is everything needs to happen so that leaves us with we can continue to ignore the question right we can continue to ignore the question we'll just answer this is option two

Carter 43:20

this is option two we're just going to now we're going to opt we're going to answer the question that we wish we asked so he just channels me and cory and he just answers whatever the hell he wants to when you ask a question cory and i are fine with it we're pretty good at it people don't even notice people think we actually answer your questions which is hysterical really i mean if anybody listened with it with an ear to this thing they know that we're not actually answering your question and then we get to option number three which is you know and i hate to make it a west wing thing because you know how cory is so devoted to that show and aaron sorkin but

Carter 43:52

but you know god God help me. Instead, you know, he does the Arnie Vinnick's, you know, press conference till you drop. Let's sit down and we'll answer the question. Why did I say that? What's happened in Alberta? What do I agree with? What do I not agree with? What would I have done if I was premier? What would I have done if I was prime minister? And you answer all those questions and you get it the fuck done so that you can go to your next event, which is a you know some truck stop in peterborough i you know that's what you need to do because this is going to dog use those are those are your three options and you can do variants between the three but at the end of the day you are answering all the questions that are asked you are answering none of the questions that are asked or you are ignoring the media and i think that the right now

Carter 44:38

right now if this was last night and we were recording the podcast why didn't we do an an emergency episode. Corey and I were available. What were you, Zane? Anyways, if we were recording it last night, I would have said, answer the question, get it done with. Now, I think that I'm in the middle where I answer what I want to answer and I continue like this is not a thing because, and maybe what I say is, Jason

Carter 45:01

Jason Kenney's the premier. You should ask him that question. I want to be prime minister. I'm not even campaigning for that job.

Zain 45:10

Corey, what do you make of Carter's three tracks and chosen strategic lane? Well,

Corey 45:16

Well, there's a fourth track, which is throw Jason Kenney under the bus, right? Which is maybe it's too late for that. Maybe it's not a practical track. But I think any of the tracks that Stephen laid out have some significant downside. They have challenges, each and every one of them. Because if you do the, it

Corey 45:32

it was the movie Dave you were saying, where he stands up and answers all the questions. It's

Zain 45:36

It's an excellent movie, Dave,

Corey 45:37

when Dave just gets

Carter 45:38

gets up. Dave did it right.

Carter 45:40

The West Wing did it wrong.

Corey 45:44

Well, the problem there is that that can really go away from you, and you are essentially guaranteeing that it will be a front page story. It's a bit of a wild swing there. I think it's the kind of thing that only works in TV. Is he in

Zain 45:57

in wild swing territory? Maybe I should

Zain 45:59

the question in that. So, the last week of a campaign, campaigns run

Zain 46:04

themselves. I understand, Corey, but this

Corey 46:06

this is a bad day. like and and in that case so what you don't do on a bad day is make bad decisions and you don't just take total bullshit approaches to politics and you and you break what is actually still nodding

Zain 46:19

nodding about carter this was one of your three

Zain 46:21

just like silently nodding on your keyboard yeah that idea

Zain 46:26

idea no it's like that idea

Corey 46:28

idea was dumb cory look at

SPEAKER_00 46:29

at this shit out of zayn do you guys not listen i would take repeating what the other one said the best

Carter 46:40

totally zayn's idea this

Zain 46:41

zayn's idea i wish we paid for the video just for that clip carter the quarter's on his phone be like yeah fuck yeah like piece

Carter 46:52

hey are we on video tomorrow with jesperson that's gonna suck yeah

Zain 46:55

yeah we are yeah uh um okay

Zain 47:00

you don't do stupid shit you think it would be desperate i'll let you keep going on that track yeah

Corey 47:04

yeah i think it would be desperate i think it would be wild the the way to deal with this it's not very glamorous it's not very sexy it's not too creative it's to go it's to answer the question once in a way that is lame but is not so so

Corey 47:15

so damaging to you like you just can't keep doing in this dodge thing i honestly i would give a version of the answer i gave earlier which is do

Corey 47:22

do i still think it was the best that was in the context of the first wave that was quite some time ago the situation in alberta is very troubling uh you know i think all of our hearts are with the people of alberta right now and just really hoping that they can get out of this carter

Zain 47:35

carter yes and it what makes it better or are you going to just yes and it with a with a dry eraser yes

Carter 47:40

yes and that's the dumbest idea i've heard um the problem is that if you do that answer that he gets asked in the next town because he's not actually able to put in the bed

Carter 47:49

bed and this is where the problem this is where he's put himself in a hole maybe he could have done that this morning and the

Carter 47:56

time he was asked it maybe he could have done it when you know the first 10 times he was asked it he could have done that answer but now he hasn't answered 11 times why do you why do you think he was so flat-footed this morning

Zain 48:07

morning it actually kind of surprised me that you know they they saw this at what 8 p.m eastern that they'd you

Zain 48:12

you know be able to work the night team and be like fuck it this This could be our campaign. This is our most notable surrogate who's been fucking absent from the trail because he's a liability politically in his province and probably outside of it. And now we're going to be asked a question about him. Why do you think or what's your understanding of why they just didn't have a knock it out of the park? And in Corey's case, knock it out of the park in this case means lame. But answer to get this over with by noon and move on to your agenda and not burn more campaign fuel on it. charitably

Carter 48:44

charitably they're tired right charitably they've gone for 32 days they've been working their asses off no one's had a day off they're getting six hours of sleep if they are lucky um really that's it they are really i'm giving them a charitable okay fine fine okay so

Zain 49:00

so i'm giving them a charitable cory will haunt me with your answer here but that's fine but

SPEAKER_00 49:04

but i think i think the reality is you think they're fucking tired zane you think that's the issue what happened but what did i tell you campaign screw themselves these

Zain 49:12

these people aren't fucking tired they're professionals you just don't fucking listen okay go ahead please okay

Carter 49:17

okay you know what you took cory's talking points that's upsetting for cory he's gonna be upset they are tired but but i think that the second reason is probably the more reasonable reason at this point and that is that they are fucking stupid they are stupid they they don't have they don't have the ability because they believed what aaron o'toole said in the second wave or whenever the hell cory said which which is Jason

Carter 49:39

Jason Kenney did this right. Everybody else did this wrong. Jason Kenney was the one who was the right-wing savior. And no one is thinking about this realistically or from the actual data. And I'm convinced

Carter 49:55

convinced that the right wing, and I say the same thing about the left-wing ideologues as well. If you are stuck in ideology and you are not looking at pragmatic data and you're not looking at the solutions based on real world activity, you are screwed. And I think that right now, Aaron O'Toole is screwed and Jason Kenney is screwing him. That's just where we are. And I don't think that the O'Toole team was ready to respond at all.

Zain 50:25

Coy, anything to add to the mix in terms of why they may not be ready to respond, whether it's from the particular moment or what you've seen and experienced in campaigns, White campaigns can be caught so flat-footed when they can see something happening from a mile away and have quite a decent amount of prep time for it.

Corey 50:41

Yeah, so let's just really be clear here. Our incredulousness is partially based on where we are. Like, as Albertans and how all-consuming this is, it seems absolutely outrageous somebody wouldn't be prepared to talk about this. But even though it's leading in national news today, it's still an Alberta story, and so perhaps they were hoping it would stay somewhat local. but let me tell you when you're on a campaign when you're in a war room when you're running those things day by day sometimes

Corey 51:08

sometimes you want to win sometimes

Corey 51:10

sometimes you want to not lose sometimes you can't do either and your real job is to minimize the damage and just decide how you can lose less and if you try to win or not lose in a situation like that you sometimes end up losing more and

Corey 51:23

and i think that's where we were i think they thought if they could just keep their mouth shut for a couple of questions not answer it that the media would move on but that wasn't a reasonable expectation and the minute they got to kind of question three and the media not backing down and the media shouting at a microphone to try to get it they

Corey 51:40

they should have realized all right

Corey 51:42

right it's time to fail fast right like we can't be doing this all day uh there are not enough days left on the election to steven's point about this is when you need to leave it all out there if

Corey 51:51

if every time you're going to to the media and

Corey 51:54

and it's this it may actually be worse than hiding But I do agree, hiding from the media is no strategy at all. But

Carter 52:00

that's what you addressed with something you just said there, and that is that we are feeling this because we are in Alberta. Do you think that there is a moment where the O'Toole camp can't access Brock Harrison, that they can't access Matt Wolfe, that they can't access Brian Bateson? These guys are available to the O'Toole team. in fact

Carter 52:18

fact where are they you

Carter 52:20

you know i asked the question on twitter yesterday where is matt wolf right he might be we don't know maybe he's on vacation and his vacation might be sitting next to aaron o'toole we don't know who's who's in the war room but i'm guaranteeing you right now there are people from alberta in that war room who did not answer the question properly because they were they were taught

Carter 52:42

taught everything they needed to know by jason kenney's government government.

Zain 52:46

That's an interesting point. Guys, I want to round this out with a few other questions.

Zain 52:51

Corey, let's talk about Trudeau before we talk about Notley. So I'll preview Notley coming up at the end of this. Trudeau has

Zain 52:58

has a tendency in this campaign, especially to when he finds a six-foot net and a basketball, he needs to dunk on it. And this seems

Zain 53:09

seems to be- And then flex. Yeah, exactly.

Zain 53:12

Kinda. That is a pretty decent metaphor for this campaign, I'd say. O'Toole, I should say, Trudeau has not dunked on Kenny today. What advice would you have for Trudeau going forward as it relates to this particular situation in Alberta? He can he just can't have a shit eating grin about it. But what does he need to do strategically as a team to try to leverage this, maximize it beyond what they've done today, which is the tying of Kenny to O'Toole, which seems to be the strategic pumping up of a George Shahal campaign video on Twitter where Shahal made the early days of the campaign tying Kenny to O'Toole. And now it seems like strategically everyone in the liberal camp is pumping that video up. But outside of those couple of tactics, what does Trudeau need to do to sustain this connection, to sustain this story in the endgame heading into Monday?

Corey 54:10

Well, I don't know. I'm not sure that I would recommend anything different than what they're doing right now, to be honest. A light touch, in a sense.

Corey 54:17

Yeah, and it will play enormously here in Alberta for the rest of the campaign. I'm not entirely convinced this is going to be the top story on Saturday in the rest of Canada. That's just how things go, unless things get even worse here in Alberta. But it does make sense to continue to be pointing out those connections behind the scenes. It does make sense to continue to try to draw Aaron O'Toole to it, to highlight the fact that he doesn't even want to answer the questions about Jason Kenney. As long as Aaron O'Toole continues to take the approach he took today, the Liberals have an opportunity on it. This is one of those things that probably would have burned itself out if they had taken a different approach earlier in the day. And so be

Corey 54:56

careful. Obviously, when your opponent's lighting themselves on fire, don't go running around them with gasoline. And I think that there is a risk if you're doing the dunk on the six-foot net. You know, you miss a dunk. Who cares? It's tough to dunk.

Corey 55:10

mean, I do it all the time. But you guys, you have trouble. We really do. Yeah. Our verticals are shit. Mini

Corey 55:18

on a six-foot net, and people are going to laugh at you.

Carter 55:20

I've seen that. Yeah,

Carter 55:21

Yeah, I've been there.

Zain 55:24

Carter, you're barely 4'8", so it is

Carter 55:28

You are like one inch taller than me.

Zain 55:35

Carter, hit me up with a true dull response. What do they need to do right now? What is it that you would be—is it continue with the light touch, or is there something more strategically, tactically that they should consider? with the story here in Alberta. Light

Carter 55:47

Light touch and figure out what wins in Ontario and Quebec. You know, this is a great media story for a day, but if I was running my national campaign, I'd say, thank you, done. Close the door on that story and let's get back to Ontario and Quebec. I mean, Ontario, you know, people love to laugh at Alberta. You know, look, we lit ourselves on fire again. Isn't that fun?

Carter 56:07

God, those Albertans, they're idiots. Ah, great.

Carter 56:10

But it lasts a day. And then the good people of Ontario and Quebec back where where this election is really being fought maybe british columbia um say okay well what about us what about our issues what about you know you don't want this to become a comparison you don't want us to be like well yeah i mean alberta's on fire but we're very close to that says british columbia um yeah well alberta's on fire but our leader is just about as bad says ontario alberta's on fire says quebec but you know we want some of the same things that they want it. More autonomy, more control. They're doing, you know, like, this next thing leads to an equalization referendum. I don't know. But the point of the exercise is go back to that which wins you votes. Don't just focus on that which is costing your opposition votes.

Zain 56:57

Right. They can't burn their campaign fuel on this as well, the liberals, that is, at a disproportionate rate. Corey, let's end with Alberta's leader of the opposition. We are here here in Alberta. She's getting a lot of national media attention because of this story, because of the election. I'm sure she would have otherwise as well as a former premier. What advice would you have for Rachel Notley here? Because part of me, and I haven't seen this, but I sense it. Part of me feels like the NDs here in Alberta are almost kind of putting on the brakes. Like, let's be kind of gentle with Kenny. Let's not get to the point where we screw screw ourselves in 2023 by pushing them out. Now, this is just one man's interpretation of what I see. But what advice would you have for them, whether you acknowledge my point or not in your response, as they look at this moment, this critical moment, and we haven't talked a lot about the local politics for Kenny and his downfall, because I want to keep it federal. But what advice would you have for her in these endgame stages where the spotlight will shine on her a bit as well, if not nationally, then certainly in Alberta?

Corey 58:02

Yeah, you observe something That's something that is, I think, very accurate. And that's that the NDP are aware that Jason

Corey 58:10

Jason Kenney being their opponent in the next election is probably their best case scenario.

Corey 58:15

It's hard to say. It's still a year and a half to the next election, but he's

Corey 58:18

he's very unpopular in the province right now. Some of the actions he's taken, it will be very difficult to walk away from, even if you're moving at a full sprint. People are going to remember that you disappeared in a pandemic that resulted in the collapse of the health care system. And you can argue about whether blame is properly apportioned or not. I just I'm not interested in that conversation from a pure politics point of view. That's the stuff that campaign ads are made of right now. And so at a certain point, do you really want to push him over the edge? Do you do you really want to knock him out of there? and maybe have to deal with a conservative leader who has some opportunity to rebuild, to distance from Jason Kenney, try to put all of the garbage out with the past leader, right?

Corey 59:03

I think that maybe that's a conversation that's happening. I'd be surprised if it wasn't. It would be a smart conversation to have in terms of political strategy.

Corey 59:12

The other thing you got to keep in mind, though, there's two other reasons why you might not want to go totally full

Corey 59:18

full ham on him, right? One of them is the gasoline and fire conversation we had earlier with Justin Trudeau. You don't want to necessarily step in it, maybe be accused of cheering on the province having failure in the health care system. You don't want to be perceived as somebody who is just being too politically calculating on it. So maybe you just sort of step back a bit and take on more of the serious tone of, oh, my goodness, yes, it's a very difficult situation in Alberta. and so it's tough to assess the strategy in in this moment in isolation because of the seriousness of the moment right we'll get a better sense of it in the next couple of weeks couple of months because if the ndp continue to treat him with kid gloves like this i think it's an indication that they're actually worried that you know he's he's just swaying there and if they just give a light breeze in his direction he might fall on the mat have to deal with someone else carter

Zain 1:00:08

carter we've seen this kid gloves approach in the past do you think it's good strategy for the ndp do you even acknowledge that's what's going on and and i'll triple barrel it why not what advice would you have for for team notley uh in these coming days let's look at the elections between now and e-day uh as it relates to jason kenney here in alberta yeah

Carter 1:00:26

yeah i'm not sure i would even acknowledge jason kenney exists if i was uh rachel notley right now i would probably focus on uh winning a couple of seats in edmonton for the ndp i'd be focused on making sure that every progressive voter even if liberals are winning the seats sees themselves in their future in me uh you know not not in jason kenney and i think that i'd be really worried that if he's going to fall you want him to fall with six months left not with 18 months left it gives them time to run a real leadership it gives them time for uh definitions to be made to be made of who this new conservative party is. And frankly, if he keeps going the way he's going, this thing's going to fracture into a thousand pieces. So let it fracture. Just stay out of the way. Your opponent's destroying themselves. Just stay out of the way.

Zain 1:01:21

Let's move it on to our next segment. Our next segment, your dad couldn't fuck with this party. Guys, Aaron O'Toole is out there. Let's keep the track on him. He's out there. He's saying that this is not your father's conservative party. Carter, Later that evening, he campaigns with Brian Mulroney, someone that many people's fathers probably voted for. In that sense, Carter, what do you think of this O'Toole strategy? Let's talk about the endorsements as well, because we got Kretchen endorsing Trudeau, Hazel McCallum endorsing Trudeau, and then quickly after when reporters find her saying, oh, we shouldn't be having this election. You had Mulroney, who's now endorsing O'Toole. But let's talk about O'Toole's endgame strategy here, Carter. Carter. He's picking the PC lane. He's picking the centrist lane. There's probably more voters there, but

Zain 1:02:10

but he's also bleeding on the right flank, if you believe any of the polling numbers with the PPC rise. Carter, I'm going to ask it to you straight. Good strategy or bad strategy as O'Toole tries to solidify his endgame by picking a lane, and perhaps surprisingly to some, not the one that many thought he would pick, running as a true blue in

Zain 1:02:29

in the leadership to what got him here? Well,

Carter 1:02:31

Well, Brian Mulroney standing at the microphone and saying, you know, O'Toole is going to have to implement some policies that aren't going to make him popular. And then finishing with, well, not that he's popular anyways. I mean, that's hurtful. That's upsetting.

Zain 1:02:48

This unpopular guy is going to do really unpopular stuff. Yeah,

Carter 1:02:52

this guy who you already don't like is

SPEAKER_00 1:02:55

is going to be even less likable. So,

Carter 1:02:57

So, I mean, Brian Mulroney, I'm old enough to remember when Brian Mulroney was death to any conservative. So the fact that he's kind of come back to rebut the Jean Chrétien, you know, probably

Carter 1:03:10

is still one of the best politicians. He always comes up with the lines and the lines are always perfect, right? Right. Like Aaron O'Toole can do something I can't do, which is speak out of both sides of my mouth. Like that is amazing. That is an amazing line that is that is constructed and can only be delivered by John Cratchit.

Carter 1:03:30

Mulroney comes in and fucking slags the guy that invited him to the table when he hasn't been invited to the table for, what, 30 years? Like no one has asked Brian Mulroney to come and help campaign for 30 years. And the first opportunity back, he just fucking hammers him. hey do you read

Zain 1:03:48

read this as a

Carter 1:03:50

don't know what this is i don't know what this is this does not strike me as the strategy the the strategy of being a progressive conservative works for me but

Carter 1:03:58

the strategy for being a progressive conservative is it for me is the jean charre lane right

Carter 1:04:03

right or you know but not brian mulrooney uh even joe clark but joe clark's not going to be seen in public with aaron o'toole um you know and and you know peter mckay is the guy you fucked over so he's not going to come and spend any time with you i think that this is this

Carter 1:04:19

this is kind of dangerous and he was better off to just occupy the policy position instead of trying to find um arguably one of the least popular prime ministers i mean he's coming up as as we remember him differently um but but boy you remember being in alberta when the reform foreign party started and well you won't but maybe cory was seven um anyways when when these things started uh people absolutely hated brian mulroney with with vitriol so seeing him come back is kind of a weird kind of a weird play card

Zain 1:04:54

card am i hearing you're saying that the i in your perspective the ideal strategic lane for o2 would have been to say let your policy speak for themselves like stop Stop covering yourself in this, like, very explicit PC blanket. Is that what you feel like the Mulrooney endorsement is? Corey, I want to ask you about that. What do you think of this strategy, both from the Mulrooney side of it, but now solidifying that, OK, and it's five days. So granted, it's not like he's been doing this for weeks. Maybe he's been edging towards it, but has now picked the PC lane as, you know, the right flank perhaps bleeds some votes and supporters and who knows what else in the endgame of this campaign for Aaron O'Toole.

Corey 1:05:33

Well, I think it does make sense to tie yourself to the old PC party because that seems to be the best opportunity you have for government, right? Of course, there's always the PPC risk, but it is very funny to see Brian Mulroney come out of basically retirement, shit on the person he's endorsing, and

Corey 1:05:53

forward. carter you said like he hasn't been around in 30 years and i was thinking well now we fucking know why right not

Corey 1:06:01

not gonna make the mistake of inviting him to a dinner party again like christ um

Corey 1:06:05

um and and the way it sort of played in the media was very funny to me too because of course you had the jean chretien comment that steven was talking about the night before yeah

Corey 1:06:14

classic jean chretien right he is very quippy jean chretien a guy who could speak neither english nor french but could communicate in both yeah right there's a famous joke uh justin trudeau's father a lesser known prime minister pierre trudeau yeah once told he was talking to somebody i think in the department of indian affairs and northern development they said oh your new your new minister uh

Corey 1:06:36

uh you know chretien uh he's really great but but his english is atrocious and trudeau replied yeah usually usually hear is french right um but uh the um the uh the point i wanted to make is then to follow that up you know somebody who obviously gets the rally to the flag and can you know warm up the base and all of that with

Corey 1:06:58

with a prime minister who's basically saying yeah he's not going to be popular and he's going to do unpopular things your

Corey 1:07:05

your man aaron o'toole everybody right i mean it was just really quite something uh

Zain 1:07:10

uh carter do you do you feel like there's a what's the risk here let's talk about risk uh as we round out because i want to get a very quick hit on this one what's the risk to a tool picking this lane i mean and and it's it's inherently another way for me to ask this question carter now that we are closer to the election what

Zain 1:07:25

what do you make of the risk of the ppc that is at the heart of my question here right because any other time in perhaps the modern modern Conservative Party, you could have said, yeah, okay, he's a PC leader, but, you know, the right flank will get in line. What else are these people going to fucking do? But with the discontent that we're seeing in the prairie provinces, with the pandering to Quebec, now to, you know, extending on your point, wearing the PC flag with an endorsement from a PC prime minister, what's the risk here to O'Toole, Carter? Like, could we be sitting here on election day, eating crow and saying, shit, this guy got, you know, a solid minority, if not majority, we're using this PC lane? Or are we going to be saying, what a fucking idiot, he could see the right flank was leaking for three weeks, and he did nothing to shore it up? What's the risk here in your mind?

Carter 1:08:17

I think the risk is that you move to the right and you lose the center. I think that, you know, the genius that was Stephen Harper, and you're not going to hear me utter that word in And in that sentence, very often, all those words together. But he was able to keep the right intact while moving to the center when he needed to. And the center felt comfortable enough to vote for him. The truth of the matter is, there are more votes in the center than there is in the right. So you move to the center to pick up those votes. That's where the people are. People don't care as much about policy as we think they do. But they do care about extremes. And they don't want to be seen as extreme. and and therefore they aren't so moving to the center is an opportunity especially in a country as diverse as Canada you know when

Carter 1:09:03

when you're trying to win votes I mean I think back to the election was it 2008 when Stephen or when Preston Manning returned to Alberta and drove up or was it Stephen Harper Stephen Harper drove up and down the highway to you

Carter 1:09:19

you know basically screaming that that the west wants in there i think it was preston manning that

Carter 1:09:24

that election was lost because they came back and appealed to the base if you can stay in in in ontario land and ontario and quebec land where there's a different style of conservatism the ppc yeah sure it picks up eight percent but it's picking up a lot more in places that are so conservative you're still probably going to win a lot of those seats so i don't think it matters that the ppc picks up 25 percent in crowfoot i don't think it matters that they pick up 25 percent in in what if they start

Zain 1:09:51

start what if they start playing spoiler in the gta and in quebec carter like that's where it does weren't

Carter 1:09:56

weren't your seats anyways those weren't your seats you got to go get the gta you got to go get the gta by moving to the center you're not going to win the seats in the gta by moving to the right you know you you move to the right at your peril you move to the right when you're protecting when you're trying not to lose being the second place party right now they're trying If you want to be the government, you've got to appeal to the middle. That's Canada in a nutshell. That's how you win government.

Carter 1:10:24

Every prime minister has done the same thing.

Zain 1:10:26

Corey, talk to me about the risk here. I agree with Carter's strategy. My question to you, Corey, is slightly different. Is the center currently occupied? Is it already reserved for Justin Trudeau's liberals? Or is there actually room here for Arnold Toole to win?

Corey 1:10:42

know, I think there's room. The question is whether the Winnebago that Aaron O'Toole drives is something that they'll let park in that space, right? And this is fundamentally the problem with the conservative brand that Aaron O'Toole has been trying to address ever since he became leader, ever since he started pivoting away from true blue conservative to what we see today, where he's hanging out with Brian Mulroney, calling himself a progressive conservative, right? Right. The plan there absolutely is to say like, hey, this is totally cool. You should let me park here. But voters are leery. They're suspicious. And it's because, well, well, his particular vehicle may seem just fine for the parking spot to just belabor this metaphor to absolute death. Yeah,

Zain 1:11:23

Yeah, it's pretty bad. And I'm not going to call you out on

Corey 1:11:25

So don't worry about it. The convoy he rolls with ain't welcome. And that's that's the thing. He's trying to say, no, no, no. Those guys aren't with me. No, no, no. Those guys are cool. and it's not necessarily clear to me that people are buying it but yeah i actually believe that there is room for a moderate conservative party and if the last two elections have taught us anything here it's that even a conservative party that's a little bit of out of step with the country can

Corey 1:11:50

can compete for government right i mean sheer won the popular vote it was a very close election in many ways o'toole regardless of what happens on monday and by the way just as i've been been saying almost every election or every episode since the start of the election i'm not saying justin trudeau is going to lose aaron o'toole could still win this thing you know the polls are very close and if they are under representing conservative strength it could very easily be on tuesday we wake up to an aaron o'toole government but if it doesn't happen we're

Corey 1:12:22

we're not going to point to it and say the problem was aaron o'toole was too moderate maybe

Corey 1:12:25

maybe we will i

Zain 1:12:26

i you know oh we could I think we could. I think we could say that, you know, he let the PPC, you know,

Corey 1:12:33

know, maybe people will say it, but my point would be this, Zane.

Corey 1:12:37

We saw what happens if you're the conservative party that keeps the PPC down. That was the Andrew Scheer model. That was the one that was a little more right wing. It didn't win, right?

Corey 1:12:45

right? I think we're seeing that there's a hard ceiling to that brand of conservatism. And that's not the brand of conservatism that Stephen Harper used to run on. Carter,

Zain 1:12:54

Carter, you've got your hand up. This is a rarity. We have one round every—people don't know this who listen to the show, but every episode we allow one raised hand interjection. And Carter, you have pulled that card. Go ahead. You're about to make an excellent point that is going to blow every listener away late on us.

Carter 1:13:14

I forgot my point.

Zain 1:13:16

thank you carter i appreciate it we'll leave that segment there let's move it over under our lightning ground uh this segment of course brought to us by our sponsor our sponsor flair airlines flair airlines flair

Zain 1:13:27

flair airlines give us a chance to let you down carter uh here's

Zain 1:13:32

here's here's where we're going to start we're going to start with biggest problem for each leader heading into the weekend stephen

Zain 1:13:39

stephen carter you're going to tell me in one sentence the biggest problem heading Heading into this weekend, for Justin Trudeau, lay it on me, what is it?

Carter 1:13:47

A lack of narrative to finish the election on. A lack of a cohesive narrative.

Zain 1:13:53

Corey Hogan, Aaron O'Toole.

Zain 1:13:55

Biggest problem, one sentence, heading into the weekend for Aaron O'Toole.

Zain 1:14:04

Nice, you don't even need one sentence. Jason Kenney, period. Steven Carter,

Zain 1:14:08

Adam E. Paul. Biggest problem, heading into the weekend, one

Zain 1:14:11

one sentence for Adam E. Paul.

Carter 1:14:12

The Green Party executive.

Zain 1:14:15

Okay. Corey, Jagmeet Singh, biggest problem heading into the weekend?

Zain 1:14:21

The Green Party executive.

Zain 1:14:25

Carter Blanchett, heading into the weekend, biggest problem?

Carter 1:14:29

Unable to take advice from Corey and I because we don't speak proficient French.

Zain 1:14:33

Oh, well, okay. That was a little weak. It was pretty weak English. uh cory maxime bernier give me the one sentence uh for his biggest problem heading into this weekend

Corey 1:14:49

dude's gonna get coveted at some point right

Zain 1:14:53

cory i'm gonna i'm gonna start with you with for our next question overrated underrated in your mind overrated or underrated uh the upside for justin trudeau on jason kenny's covet response response, overrated or

Corey 1:15:08

or underrated in your mind?

Corey 1:15:09

I mean, overrated based on how we've been talking on this show, because I do think ultimately being not in Alberta will be a saving grace for Aaron O'Toole. You know, it's not where a lot of the swing stuff is, but underrated probably as a broader narrative. Carter,

Zain 1:15:25

Carter, same question to you. Overrated, underrated for Justin Trudeau, the upside on Jason Kenney's COVID response, the upside side politically of course overrated

Carter 1:15:32

overrated i think that the rest of the the

Carter 1:15:34

the rest of uh the rest of the voters remain selfish and will just kind of laugh at us uh and not attribute any of the opportunity that their provinces have avoided the shit show that is alberta uh they will not attribute that to to justin trudeau yeah

Corey 1:15:52

yeah can i say rest of canada how much it pisses me off that You sit here, and I will often see that it's like, well, Alberta, it's shambolic, and Alberta's a conservative place. Ergo, the conservatives will be shambolic if given the chance to govern nationally.

Corey 1:16:07

You know, just not fair to our province. You know, the UCP government right now is not particularly popular. Why are you acting as though this is a strategy that is endorsed by the good people of Alberta?

Carter 1:16:20

It's true. We do not endorse this.

Zain 1:16:22

Oh, thank you, Carter. Thank you for that real solid add-on, that tag. You really helped it there. I've

Carter 1:16:28

I've been maintaining my even pace and tone through this entire episode. Let's

Zain 1:16:35

Let's see if you can do it now. Let's see if you can do it now. Carter, there's always been a mythology that the conservative party has a get-out-the-vote polling bump built in, that they're excellent at getting out the vote. The GOTV polling bump for the conservatives, Carter, overrated or underrated?

Carter 1:16:52

Underrated. I think that they are able to pull out the votes. They really have a very strong machine. The problem is it's all in the wrong places. The point that I'd forgotten to make earlier is that, you

Carter 1:17:03

you know, when you drive up the score in the areas that are very conservative, you're able to go to to the number one. You get the most votes, but because they're so inefficient, you lose actual seats. And this is where the the the the G

Carter 1:17:18

G.O.T.V. model for the conservatives just gets gets in there and drives those fucking crazy fucking lunatics to the polls. And that's that's where things kind of fall apart.

Zain 1:17:36

So, Corey, Corey, Corey, overrated, underrated the G.O.T.V. polling bump for the conservatives.

Corey 1:17:44

what did i just watch i

Zain 1:17:45

i don't know i'm trying to power through it because i don't want to remember i'm

Carter 1:17:49

i'm relaxed i'm calm did

Zain 1:17:50

did i did i ever mention how glad i am we don't record the video did

Zain 1:17:53

did i ever mention pay so

Carter 1:17:54

so much money for the video they'd pay you so much you

Zain 1:17:58

you you would be so disappointed by that prediction cory overrated underrated the conservative gotv polling bub i

Corey 1:18:08

think it is underrated at this moment people seem to be forgetting about it seem to be forgetting that it happens fairly regularly and that in elections that are of lower intensity likely voters are

Corey 1:18:20

are more important than the voting pool as a whole and this seems to still be the seinfeld election uh

Zain 1:18:24

uh carter i'm going to start with you on this question who would you like to be right now thursday night friday morning heading into the monday election which leader leader would you like to be that is not Annamie Paul, Yves-François Blanchet, Maxime Bernier, or Jagmeet Singh?

Zain 1:18:46

I guess. Yeah. Corey, same question for you. Who would you like to be tonight, Thursday

Zain 1:18:51

Thursday night slash Friday morning, heading into the election on Monday?

Corey 1:18:57

the first time, this campaign, I am going to say Justin Trudeau.

Zain 1:19:03

Stephen Carter, I'm going to actually ask you a bonus question. Jason Kenney, great premier or greatest premier? He

SPEAKER_00 1:19:10

He is the greatest excuse for shit that has ever been a premier in this entire country. How does he go on vacation when the province is on fire? How does he not act four weeks ago when every single one of us, listen to the fucking podcast, Jason. Understand what's actually happening. This is not a fucking drill. all we ask from you is good government and you were not even able to deliver that this is bullshit how the fuck did you wind up in charge how the fuck are ministers not resigning if i was a minister in your government i would take a shit on your desk and then i walked the fuck out the door and say you're the worst fucking premier in the history of mankind i can't be associated with you anymore i want to have a career in the future it doesn't matter if it's in politics or They're walking dogs. No one's going to hire any of these fucking people.

Zain 1:20:01

We'll leave it there. That's a wrap on episode 944 of The Strategist. My name is Zane Velgey. With me, as always, the brilliant Corey Hogan, the extremely calm Stephen Carter. And we'll see you next time.

Transcript