Keean Bexte, a Calgary-based Rebel contributor from Vulcan, Alberta, opposes Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s 30 km/h speed limit push (implemented September 2018), calling it ineffective and potentially a $20M revenue grab via photo radar. He criticizes Nenshi’s $83K legal fees to block misconduct documents and the NDP’s $5.2B Olympic bid as political vanity projects, while accusing energy minister Marg McQuaig-Boyd of deflecting blame onto Stephen Harper instead of fixing Trans Mountain’s 8,000 job losses. Bexte also attacks Bill C-71’s gun restrictions, warning of rural backlash after Liberal losses in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and vows to expose NDP MLAs like Mike Connolly for misusing taxpayer funds. His future work will scrutinize any government—including Jason Kenney’s UCP—if it strays from accountability, with contact via @economic or kian@rnnmail.ca. [Automatically generated summary]
And tonight we're discussing some of the things that we're both passionate about, like gun rights, government transparency, how awful the NDP are, and pipelines.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Alberta's election is not even a year away.
It's May 2019.
Things are going to get a little wild in this province between then and now as the NDP get more and more desperate to hang on to power.
The NDP, they're going to hide their pasts and hide their lack of action and lack of advocacy on issues that are important to real, normal, everyday Albertans.
And just last fall, Calgary's Mayor Nenshi was given another term despite a little bit of a last-minute conservative insurgency.
Nenshi feels like he's got a mandate to continue with his ongoing policy of governing from behind closed doors and wasting taxpayer money on vanity projects like an Olympics and public art that looks like garbage.
There is so much going on in our city to the south that we had to call in reinforcements.
We've hired a new advocacy journalist and some of you may have seen his work already.
His name is Kian Bexte and part of his job is fighting for issues that you care about.
So joining me tonight to discuss some of the things that are on the top of his mind and that matter to him is my scrappy new co-worker, Kian Bextie.
So joining me now from Vulcan, Alberta, is new Rebel contributor, Kian Bextie.
Hey Kian, thanks for joining me.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
So I think it's important to have you on my show because you and I are going to be working very closely going forward and I think we care a lot about the same issues.
I think we're passionate about government accountability and personal responsibility and holding politicians to account.
And I thought it was important to have you on so that our viewers could get to know you a little bit better and you and I could just sort of chit chat about the things that are important to both of us.
And you hit the ground running when you came to work for us here at the Rebel.
City Council's Secret Meetings00:15:23
You started off your very first video, your very first story was a campaign against lowering the speed limit in Calgary.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that and give us an update because some of the circumstances around your story are changing pretty fast.
Yeah, for sure.
So we started this campaign about a week and a half ago where we, after we found out that city council was interested or looking into reducing the speed limit in the residential streets of Calgary, Drew Farrell, the counselor who's spearheading this, has a history of wanting to reduce speed limits in the city, no matter where they are.
That's just what she does.
Originally, it started back in her single ward in the Sunnyside area where she wanted to reduce the local speed limit to make the entire city more pedestrian friendly.
And it even went as far as to wanting to block off Memorial Drive, one of the largest arteries in the entire city, Just block it off entirely for part of the day so that there could be a farmer's market type pedestrian gathering.
She's just the most anti-car person you can find in the city, and she just happens to be sitting.
Oh, sorry, she just happens to be sitting on city council.
So after that failed, the reduction, her part of her pedestrian strategy a couple years ago, now that there's a new council, she thought she could have some more support for this.
She brought it back, and this time it passed.
So the speed limits aren't being reduced right now, but by margin of, I believe it was eight to six, they've agreed to start looking into the idea.
So they've directed the city administration to start costing it out and working with their shareholders so that by the time September comes around next year, they'll be able to reduce the speed limits from 50 kilometers an hour to 30 kilometers an hour on every single residential street in the city.
Is it me or does this feel like nothing more than a cash grab?
Well, it very well could be.
I mean, they say it's under the guise of wanting to protect pedestrians, but if that was the case, they would opt for a more sensible approach, like raised crosswalks or less wide roadways.
But instead, they've decided to just slow the city down or at least the speed limit down.
Whether or not this is actually going to slow drivers down is another question.
But the city collected over $20 million in revenue from photo radar taxes.
Last, like this was 2016 numbers, I think.
So when the speed limits reduced from 50 to 30, like just imagine how much money they're going to make.
And you can bet that they're going to be spending this on bike lanes.
They're going to be spending it on whatever they can that is just going to keep hurting cars and keep hurting suburban Calgary.
Well, and that's the thing.
Like we see it all the time in Edmonton, but I would say that Calgary is even more sprawling.
It's a commuter city.
This idea that cities that were built and suburbs that were built for people to live outside of the city and commute, like that's why suburbs are built, so that you can get in your car, drive to the city, and drive back out.
People don't necessarily want to live in the city, and yet there's this perpetual war on cars that someone who lives in Airdrie or one of the surrounding bedroom communities that they should be riding their bike.
It just doesn't work, especially in Western Canada, with the exception of probably Vancouver.
We're just not built to operate that way.
It's a strange mentality.
It is very strange.
I just want to quote something from the resolution that they passed yesterday.
It says, be it further resolved that all communities currently being planned have local road network designs that do not prioritize speed and flow of traffic over safety of non-motor vehicle users.
Communities under design shall recognize the need for safe pedestrian infrastructure.
They just have this warped idea that they need to pit drivers against cars, drivers against pedestrians, like this false dichotomy that only one can benefit if the other one is hurt in the process.
And it's really frustrating because they just don't seem to give any thought to infrastructure changes, be it speed bumps or raised crosswalks.
They just want to make pedestrians feel unsafe so that they can keep up their war on cars.
I guess that sort of brings me to my next question to you about what's happening down at Calgary City Hall.
It seems like they're a bunch of cloistered bureaucrats and frankly, a little bit like totalitarians down there.
They sort of don't think that the public has any right to know what's going on at Calgary City Hall.
We just received news that Mayor Nenshi has paid out $83,000 to lawyers representing city councilors to basically block the public from finding out what sort of misconduct, if any, is happening down at Calgary City Hall.
Yeah, well, I'm glad it clarified that was the thing that they were trying to hide from the public because there's a lot right now from the Olympic bid, from the leaked council documents, from the in-camera session to this.
Like it's just Nenshi and his band of buddies are trying desperately to hide everything they can from the public.
Whatever it is, whatever they're doing, the public cannot know about it.
And it seems to be something that's really special to Calgary.
There's no other city in Canada that really comes close to A, how much time we spend in camera and B, how much time our counselors spend getting sued or suing other people or just spending money on lawyers for whatever reason, whether it be to hide FOIP requests or redact FOIP requests or because they've done other undesirable things.
So $83,000 is a lot of money.
It's really disappointing, I think, that it took so much effort on behalf of, you know, got to give it credit where credit is due, the CBC, how much work it took them to actually get this amount of money disclosed to the public.
It's just sad really all around.
Yeah, I mean, when you really think about it in real life terms, Nenshi paid lawyers tax dollars to prevent taxpayers from finding out what's going down at City Hall when taxpayers pay their salary.
I mean, it is the, it's so sneaky and clandestine.
And it's, you know, the opposite of the transparency that he promised Calgarians.
And you mentioned something that I wanted to touch on.
Our friends from Safe Calgary were talking about this this week.
They talked about the amount of times that Nenshi has appeared or that Nenshi and City Council have met in camera.
Now that's like a fancy downtown city council jargon for meeting in private.
So there's no public participation.
You can't go down and see these council meetings the way you normally could sit in on any sort of legislative session.
The city of Calgary, in two years between 2014 and 2016, so again under Mayor Nenshi, they've met, as they say, in camera 700 times.
And according to Safe Calgary, 25% of all council meetings are secret.
And, you know, when you compare that to other cities across the country, Toronto has only met 18 times in camera in that same amount of time.
It's shocking.
It is.
And it's undemocratic.
Fundamentally, there's a problem where when we go to an election, we are not able to judge our elected officials based off of what they've done because it's so in secret.
going back to the $83,000 spent on legal fees.
We still don't know which counselors were behind that because it was redacted by the city administration.
When they go in council, we have no idea what views these counselors are taking on matters that aren't allowed to be disclosed to the public.
And when someone does disclose it to the public, then Nenshi goes after them like they've just broken the law, like they're criminals, when all they really did was share with their constituents what their government is doing.
This isn't Nenshi's government.
It's the people's government.
It's Calgarians' government.
But Nenshi just seems to think that it belongs to him.
And if it doesn't go his way, he's just going to go into the council chambers and make it so behind closed doors.
Well, and this attitude of secrecy and this idea that city council is entitled to information and they're entitled to withhold that information has sort of spilled over into the Olympic bid.
Yeah, I mean, there was a couple questions being asked of the Olympic bidding CEO.
I can't, her name's slipping my mind right now.
But I went and sat in on that council session because I was interested in the 30 kilometer an hour speed limit reduction, which was supposed to be happening that same day, but it was pushed back a couple weeks because it took so long to talk about the Olympic bid.
But after time and time again, the councilor stood up and asked the BIDCO CEO questions, and she just kind of gave non-answers.
And a lot of the counselors were completely fine with that.
They were shooting her puffballs.
And then it came to Jeremy Farkas, who was really interested in how much money was going to be spent, city dollars, was going to be spent on Bidco advertising the bid to the public during the plebiscite.
And the counselor was, Jeremy Farkas sort of put the BIDCO CEO in a corner and eventually it came out.
But it was just, he had to fight tooth and nail that the city was going to be spending money on BidCo to be manipulating the public to be voting yes.
She said, and this is just a rough quote, but she said that they will be trying to inform Calgarians how impressive this bid will be and how why they should be voting yes.
Not a two sides of the coin kind of thing.
It was just why they should be supporting the bid.
Millions of dollars are going to be spent on that.
So going forward, it's something that I'm really going to be interested in following and sharing with our viewers because I just think it's just the most dastardly thing to be spending this much money.
Well, we have yet to find out exactly how much money it'll be, but to be spending any money trying to manipulate the public in the midst of a democratic vote.
I think it's deplorable.
Well, and I think it is something that while currently taxpayers are footing the pill for BIDCO, this company that it exists, at least according to its mandate, to decide or to present evidence whether or not Calgary should even pursue the bid.
That's why it exists, but it looks like it's already promoting the yes side.
And City of Calgary is already spending money on that.
But the bid itself, lowball $5.2 billion.
And that number keeps going up.
It's gone up a billion dollars since last spring.
And apparently it's supposed to be a cost-sharing initiative.
The feds are going to kick in some money.
Rachel Notley is supposed to kick in the money.
No level of government can actually afford that in this economy.
But I think it's something that the entire country needs to care about because every single Canadian taxpayer is going to be footing the bill for what I would suggest is a vanity project and legacy project for Mayor Nenshi and to some extent Rachel Notley.
I mean, absolutely.
I think Rachel Notley specifically knows that she's going to be, she's probably going to be gone by the time, but it will be her legacy.
I want to go back to what you said, though, about the feds, the province, and the city pitching the money.
It seems like every level of government is trying to say, oh, but look at how much this other level of government is pitching in.
At the end of the day, Calgary taxpayers pay money to the city of Calgary, the province of Alberta, and the federal government of Canada.
They say it's the other government pitching the money, but at the end of the day, it's the exact same people time and time again.
Whether or not you're in southern Alberta, northern Alberta, Quebec, or in Calgary, the amount is variable.
But at the end of the day, every taxpayer is going to be on the hook for these games, which have a track record of overspending, of losing revenue, and being just a corrupt organization that we just don't need to take any part in.
Now, we sort of wandered into Rachel Notley criticism country, which is one of my favorite places to be.
Again, you know, credit where it's due, but the CBC got access to our energy minister, Marg McQuaig-Boyd, and her chief of staff.
The CBC filed a Freedom of Information request to get access to their emails during the time of April 8th and May 28th.
So that was, you know, basically deadline time for Transmountain.
And I guess the first thing I'll say is I'm always glad when Marg McQuaig Boyd is in the news because I'm always happy to hear that woman is still alive because we actually never hear anything from her and she should be one of the most prominent people in Rachel Notley's cabinet, considering.
So, you know, good that we have proof of life.
But during that time, when they should have been furiously working on doing whatever they could to save Trans Mountain, their main focus was on Jason Kenney and how the allegedly nonpartisan bureaucrats in the energy ministry could spin the failure of Rachel Notley's government on Trans Mountain as somehow Jason Kenney's doing years earlier.
Rural Anger Over Gun Rules00:08:07
I mean, time and time again, whether it's the mainstream media or partisan bureaucrats, they keep saying that Stephen Harper and his government made absolutely no progress on pipelines when that's categorically untrue.
And the stark contrast between the tone of discussions back in the Harper era is so different than right now, where right now it's all about reconciliation and appeasement, whereas before it was about getting a job done.
That doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
Certainly not for Rachel Notley.
I mean, Trudeau's a lost cause, but at least you'd think that the premier of oil country would be sticking out for us.
But no, for her, it seems like a game, honestly, a political game that she's just barely hanging on to so that she can try and get elected next term.
You know, and can anybody really not understand why we can't get a pipeline done when the energy ministry bureaucrats are worried about helping Rachel Notley win the next election instead of saving 8,000 jobs directly tied to TMX?
I mean, that's the story of this government, though.
Nothing is their fault.
And their priorities are just so skewed.
They were focused on saving their own political shirts instead of keeping clothes on the back of the children of 8,000 oil patch workers.
Absolutely.
There's that.
It's either past government's fault or another government entirely.
You're right.
It is never Rachel Notley's fault.
There's that.
There's the name and blame game.
Then there's the fact that our confederation is in shambles, the fact that we can't build such a simple project.
I mean, I don't want to say it's simple.
There's so much money being invested in this, and so many workers' jobs are on the line.
But really, this should be simple, right?
Like it should be laying a pipe to tie water.
That's what it needs to be.
And there's just so many variables thrown into this, needless variables by our confederation from Quebec to BC that are making this difficult, purposely for either ideologically driven reasons or because they just really don't like Alberta for some reason.
And at the end of the day, it's the workers and the children of those workers that are catching the flock for that.
You know, and you're so right when you say it.
It really, this pipeline is a literal no-brainer.
It's the twinning of an existing pipeline that has been operation since that has been in operation since the end of the Korean War.
And it'll be twinned in the existing easement.
You know, I've been up on Burnaby Mountain.
You don't know that there's a tank farm there.
The trees have grown up around it because the thing has been there that long.
And the people who live on Burnaby Mountain literally don't care that there's a tank farm there.
It's all these like foreign interlopers from other places in British Columbia and foreign-funded radicals who seem to be fighting for what the people who live in the community don't actually care about.
Yeah.
Now, the last thing I wanted to talk to you about today is because you're rural, you're from a farm, I'm from a farm.
And so firearms are a way of life for, at least for me.
I bet they are for you.
You know, it's from gopher shooting in the spring, which is pretty fun, to predator control to hunting.
It's just a way of life.
And on Monday night in the House of Commons, the Liberals' latest gun control law, Bill C-71, passed the House of Commons.
And now it's headed off to the Senate.
And what I think a lot of people don't realize is it's not just about new rules around transporting restricted firearms, but this also, again, made a series of Canadian firearms, at least when this passes the Senate, it will make a bunch of those firearms illegal again.
So they've moved directly from not even restricted.
They're just from regular old, you know, long guns sitting in the gun cabinet to prohibited.
So again, because of an act of parliament, a whole swath of Canadians are criminals on paper when they haven't done anything wrong.
And it just seems like constantly these gun control legislation seems to be churned out of this belt between Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal and the rest of the country.
I guess what the Americans would call flyover country, but the West and the rest of down East, we have to live by these rules created to deal with criminals in their progressive cities when we haven't done anything wrong.
Oh, it's just like it's just like back, I don't remember the bill exactly, but when they made a 22 clip a criminal offense to have, I think if it had more than 10 rounds in it, if you're going outside into your field to shoot more than 10 gophers, you're a criminal, you know, like and they changed the rules in the middle of the game, just like that, when there was really no reason.
I can't, I don't know if there's ever been an instance in Canada where 22 has been used for a mass 22 long gun rifle has been used for a mass shooting.
I don't think it ever has.
But no, those farmers out in the field, they're the criminals and they're the ones that we got as scapegoats.
So.
You know, on some level, you know, as someone who firmly believes in firearms rights and who makes it a point to exercise my firearms rights as a Canadian as frequently as I can, because, you know, frankly, it's fun.
I sort of welcome the blowback the liberals are going to get for this from their own rural ridings.
I was talking to Tony Bernardo from the Canadian Shooting Sports Association, and by their best estimates, they say roughly 60 seats were lost by the Liberals over the long gun registry and more specifically by Stephen Harper promising to nuke the long gun registry.
That was enough to flip those rural ridings.
So as much as I hate being tread upon by the liberals, this could be the, between this and their musings about handgun confiscation, they're in for a world to hurt, I think.
Yeah, I mean, those seats that they lost, they're the seats that are in Saskatchewan that they could have won.
They're the seats in Manitoba and rural northern Ontario that really's lifestyle, like you said earlier, from predator mitigation to pest mitigation.
It's not like shooting gophers and controlling pests like that.
It's not even just a fun, fun activity on the weekend.
They destroy fields of alfalfa in magnitudes of bales.
You shoot a certain amount of gophers and you have a certain amount more revenue on your farm because those gophers aren't a problem.
I mean, I guess the alternative is spreading Strychnine around the field so that it gets biomagnified into the ecosystem.
And then there's hawks and birds of prey that can't have hashlings anymore.
So I guess it's up to the liberals if they want to take the environmental stance on this one or if they want to attack firearms owners, but it's one or the other guys.
You know, isn't that always the way?
There's always those unintended consequences that urban liberals just don't understand.
Always, like every single time.
Cannot Wait: Next Day Off00:03:16
You know, Kian, I wanted to give you a chance to let us know what sort of stories that you're going to be working on in the future and maybe just how people can get a hold of you if they have story ideas or concerns and comments.
Where can they find you?
Sure.
So you can, if anyone has a story idea, they can always tweet me at economic.
I'm sure it can show up somewhere on the screen here.
And then also my email, which is kian at rnnmail.ca.
What I'm going to be working on here in the future is main, and I don't want to give away too much, but there's a lot of work that we're going to be putting into really taking down the NDP backbench for MLAs.
One by one, really showing to the public how much they've been, A, wasting taxpayers' money, and B, how they've been misrepresenting Alberta's Albertans, because we know that they are an accidental government.
And most of these NDP MLAs, who you can see, are jumping ship already from that guy in Northern Calgary Hawkwood MLA.
What's his name?
Mike Connolly.
Yeah.
He's out.
He's the latest superat to jump off the SS Notley.
Yeah.
And they're all jumping ship, and you know, because they really don't care about this job, they've just happened into it in their 20s and their early 30s.
They don't know what they're doing.
So there's lots of ammo, and we're going to be slowly taking that apart as we come up to the next election because it's pretty soon here.
I think it's in six months or so.
May 2019.
Can't wait.
I cannot wait.
I am going to be well, just let's just say I'm taking the next day off work.
Like, don't expect any work from me the next day.
Kean, I wanted to thank you so much for coming on the show.
And I look forward to seeing what sort of exciting things you're working on next.
Awesome.
I'll keep you posted.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks, Kian.
I'm very excited to be working with Kian.
He and I are committed to holding the government accountable.
And we don't just mean Rachel Notley's NDP government or Nenshe at Calgary City Hall or John Iverson in Edmonton or even Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.
We also mean that when Jason Kenny eventually defeats Rachel Notley in the next election, that we will be there to hold Kenny accountable to the people who elected him also.
We are going to remind Kenny that he promised to repeal a carbon tax as his first act as premier.
And when the United Conservative Party inevitably drifts left, it will be our job to gently drag them back right.
It might not make us very popular with conservative politicians, but being a thorn in the side of politicians has never really bothered us much.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
I hope you know Kian a little bit better now.
I know I do.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.