The race for Mayor formally began in Calgary with Jeromy Farkas officially entering the race while Jeromy’s maverick counterpart in Edmonton, Mike Nickel fought off efforts of his council colleagues to censor him. We discussed how the municipal governments of both Edmonton and Calgary are both irreparably broken and how the 2021 municipal elections may lead to the sea-change which both of the city councils desperately need to see.
Farkas and Nickel are both daring to go against the grain and it is going to make for a very hard fought election year in Alberta.
I am not celebrating the firing of Ryan Jespersen from 630 CHED this week. These are tough times and it is never a good thing to see somebody losing their job.
That said, I am not shedding any tears for Jespersen either. Ryan Jespersen is a victim of the same cancel culture that he gleefully fed when Don Cherry was fired from Sportsnet.
When I pointed out that the cancellation of free speech and expression was not something to aspire to during the Cherry controversy, Jespersen responded to my tweet with the snide response below.
Indeed Mr. Jespersen. You found that out rather clearly this week didn’t you?
All Cherry had to say was “you people” in a segment and the baying leftist mobs went hysteric in their efforts to paint Don Cherry as the second coming of Hitler. It led to the end of a career which had spanned decades. Jespersen was among the mob with his little torch and pitchfork and was busily creating the rationale for Cherry’s cancelation.
Ahh yes. If only you had heeded your own advice Jespersen. You may have still been employed today.
What the fools feeding the cancel culture mob just don’t seem capable of understanding is that it is inevitable that the mob will eventually turn against them. Just ask Wendy Mesley.
This is creating a dull, vanilla world of mainstream media where personalities fear to step out of the crowd to speak something for fear of something being read into their statements.
I don’t think Jespersen is a racist by any means and I don’t think his chimpanzee comment directed at Councilor Mike Nickel’s staff was intended as a racial slur just as I don’t think Cherry was out to smear all immigrants when he said “you people”. That doesn’t matter to the baying mob which will read the worst into any statement and relentlessly react on social media.
In reality, I suspect that the firing of both Jespersen and Cherry had more to do with internal economics than with anything they said. Mainstream media is losing money on all levels and they are desperately trying to stem the bleeding. Cherry was doubtless one of the most expensive personalities that Sportsnet had and ratings were plummeting at CHED while Jespersen held the prime daytime slot. Their statements simply gave their employers the excuse to give them the boot.
Christopher Bataluk dug out the CHED ratings below.
Losing a third of listeners in two years is nothing less than a catastrophe. Jesperson may not have been solely responsible for that drop but he sure as hell wasn’t drawing in new traffic. The station clearly needs some heavy restructuring and Jesperson provided them with the justification to fire him and open up their main slot for something new. Rest assured, if ratings were climbing or even static, Jesperson would still have a job.
We need diverse voices out there even if we don’t agree with them all. Jesperson says he isn’t going away and I do hope that he finds a platform in new media.
I do also hope that Jesperson has learned what a monster “cancel culture” really is. It’s irrational, cruel and uncompromising. Feeding it will only lead to your own demise eventually.
She loves her firearms, her individual rights and small government. She was openly supportive of Jason Kenney and the United Conservative Party in the last Alberta general election and she wrote a fantastic endorsement of candidate Leslyn Lewis in the BOE Report during Conservative Party of Canada leadership race.
She also happens to be transgender.
Conservatives have long held some social hangups which hold them back as an evolving political group, particularly when it comes to sexual orientation and gender identities. We are getting much better and people from the LGBT community are becoming increasingly comfortable in coming out of the political closet as conservatives.
We still have a way to go though. Transgenderism and trans issues are sort of the final and most complicated of the sexual identity package which conservatives are learning to embrace.
It takes some work to try and understand this tricky issue but it is well worth delving into. There is no better way to try and gain an understanding on an issue than in chatting directly with people who are literally living within it.
Tiffany Gillis was fantastically candid and open as we had an extended conversation about trans issues and the challenges surrounding them.
The bottom line is, we have to get better at being live and let live with our attitudes and stop judging other people over their lifestyles and identities. It makes us better people and makes the conservative movement stronger.
We finished the chat with some discussion on Trudeau’s “green” plans and some speculation as to why Jason Kenny is having such a hard time at the polls.
This morning, Jeromy Farkas became the first formal contender to announce a run for the Mayoral seat in Calgary in the 2021 election. Nobody else has announced yet and Naheed Nenshi remains coy about whether or not he will seek another term.
Farkas has ruffled more than a few feathers in his term on city council and he has forced the city to examine many issues on waste and transparency which they wouldn’t have otherwise.
We all see footage and clips of protests, riots and such on the news but few of us actually venture down to those events in person to see what is going on for ourselves.
We can’t blame people for not wanting to go to these things themselves. It can be dangerous and most people simply have better things to do.
Unfortunately, that means that most people only get an incomplete picture of what is happening at these protests. Short clips from an often biased media are all we get and many folks have in incomplete knowledge of what goes on at these protests.
Greg Renouf has been attending protests, occupations etc. for over eight years now. He has documented and shared what he has seen on various platforms of social media. He has been assaulted and threatened as extreme protesters try to avoid exposure of what they are really all about and who is behind them.
Greg chats of his experiences and what he has learned in his visits to the world of chronic protesters.
Let me repeat that a little louder since so few people in leadership seem to understand this principle.
RACE BASED POLICIES ARE ALWAYS WRONG!
Justin Trudeau just created a new level of systemic racism in Canada when he introduced a government program which will give loans exclusively to black people.
I don’t care what the motivations are for race based policy. It always does more damage than good.
Race based policies kept natives as second class citizens in Canada who had to get a permit to leave the reserve. Race based policies had native children stripped from their homes and dumped into residential schools with catastrophic results. Race based policies created the Jim Crow policies which made black people second class citizens within the United States.
All of the above policies are now thankfully long gone. Unfortunately, a long line of fools seem to feel that through implementing even more race based policies, they will somehow undo the damages of the past.
The only acceptable race based policies are no race based policies. We are all human and should all be under the exact same laws at all times. No racially based schools, programs or laws. What we need is true equality and the only way to get there is to remove all race based laws. We sure as hell don’t need to be adding more of them.
Identity politics are tearing the developed world apart from within and they are fed by race based policies which separate rather than unite us. Entitlement and victimhood are leading to anger and violence. Drawing further lines in the sand based on race are not going to help us all learn to live together.
Whether it’s the Indian Act. affirmative action, or Trudeau’s latest racist policy, they all will do more damage than good.
You can’t put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it and you can’t undo the damage caused by racially based policies with the addition of more racially based policies.
When will we ever learn that two wrongs never make a right?
The fiscal update from the Alberta government was terrifying as we embrace over $100 billion in debt. There has never been a deficit this large in Alberta’s entire history and there is no sign yet that it will be getting better any time soon.
Not all of this can be blamed on the pandemic. Alberta was heading into another big deficit well before we ever even heard of COVID-19.
Franco Terrazzano of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and I discuss how we got into this mess and more importantly, what we will have to do to get out of it.
Alberta got debt free before and we can do it again.
When will we see a leader with the will and fortitude to do it though
Click below to download or listen directly. It was a great chat.
Go on. Look for yourselves. Just google deaths in Sweden. Its all right there in a nifty chart. The numbers were tiny by July and they are next to nothing now. One every few days out of a population of 10 million people.
SWEDEN HAS DONE THIS WITHOUT LOCKDOWNS OR MASK LAWS!
How stark does the damned evidence have to be?
Its not that Sweden did nothing. Many people voluntarily quarantined and socially distanced themselves and large gatherings were banned.
That said, schools and restaurants remained open without restriction. Masks are not in general use today and look! The plague never took off!
Yes, they had a big initial spike. It turns out that like many other nations, Sweden initially and foolishly put infected people among their seniors. A terrible error.
We need to look at today though. Sweden has proven and is proving that the lockdowns and mask laws are nothing less than utter bullshit.
No more excuses.
If masks and lockdowns were what was needed, Sweden would be the worst nation on the planet with deaths in the thousands per day. They are barely having a couple deaths per week. They are doing better than we are where we are throttling our economy and making people wear masks wherever they go like a bunch of idiots.
I am forever in Sweden’s debt because in acting as a control group, they prove all of those who are claiming that our current dropping numbers are due to mask use and lockdowns are full of shit.
Now how badly are we going to castrate our economy and panic over what has turned out to be a really bad flu that had to run its course?