Save Calgary! Sheila Gunn-Reed and William Macbeth expose Calgary’s 13.4% unemployment crisis, where Mayor Nenshi’s proposed taxes on Uber, home offices, and electricity—despite a $4B budget with 40% wage hikes—threaten business flight to suburbs like Airdrie. They link the We Charity scandal to Liberal MPs’ silence, contrast it with Harper-era defenses, and critique media partnerships with government-funded outlets. Save Calgary’s petition targets Alberta’s Madhu to block tax hikes, leveraging past successes like halting an Olympic bid, while Dolly Parton’s literacy advocacy earns bipartisan praise. Local watchdogs prove municipal politics can still shift the needle without partisan funding. [Automatically generated summary]
Hello Rebels, you're listening to a free audio-only recording of my weekly Wednesday night show, The Gun Show.
Tonight, my guest is my friend, William Macbeth from the little municipal taxpayer organization that could save Calgary.
Tonight we're talking about, well, everything.
The Wii scandal, the Conservative Party leadership, and how Mayor Nenshi is finding new ways to raise taxes on an already seriously unemployed Calgary populace.
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Justin Trudeau isn't the only politician in the country looking to pick your pockets in a pandemic.
Calgary's mayor is doing it too.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Up to 30% of downtown Calgary's commercial real estate sits vacant.
The entire country is struggling with the coronavirus shutdown-inspired unemployment, and Calgary is no different.
And things were already bad before the coronavirus came along and made it worse.
Alberta still doesn't have access to Tidewater for our greatest and best resources, our oil and gas.
But Justin Trudeau is not the only politician in the country deciding to raise taxes in the middle of the worst economic downturn in about 100 or so years.
Calgary's Mayor Nahib Nenshi is considering several new tax and fee grabs on the long-suffering residents of Calgary, Alberta.
Liberal MPs And The Prime Minister's Dilemma00:14:54
Joining me tonight in an interview we recorded earlier in the week is my dear friend, William Macbeth, from Save Calgary to discuss first the Conservative Party leadership race and then the ever-unfolding We charity scandal and also why Calgary City Council can't seem to realize it has a spending problem and not a revenue problem.
now from calgary is my friend willie mcbeth from save calgary William, thanks for coming on the show.
Before we get to anything else, I want to talk to you about the We scandal, because that's all anybody can talk about, including me.
You've been a conservative activist for a long time, longer than me, even.
I think you've been politically engaged in the machinery and outside.
Is this scandal going to harm Justin Trudeau, or is this just going to go by the wayside?
The likes of Blackface, the Kokani Grope, the AgaCon, and the whole trip to India, Bollywood fiasco.
Is this actually something that's going to hurt him with his base or just with conservatives who don't like him anyway?
You know, it's interesting.
It's always hard to tell exactly how a scandal is going to unfold and what the long-term impact would be.
You know, had you asked me in the last federal election about the photos of the prime minister wearing blackface, I would have said that that would have been terminal to a politician.
But here he is, still prime minister, still breaking ethics laws, it seems.
So I think what's different, though, in this case, is how many liberal MPs appear to be unhappy with the actions of the prime minister.
You know, normally when there's a failure on the part of the prime minister or his team, you can count on a legion of liberal MPs to leap to the prime minister's defense.
My favorite one was after Canada lost its Security Council bid.
We had an Ontario Liberal MP, I believe it was MP Rodriguez saying, well, he can't believe that people are trying to make this a partisan issue against the prime minister when everybody knows that's exactly what the liberals did when Stephen Harper lost a Security Council seat.
So normally they all leap to defend the Prime Minister, but you're not seeing that so much this time.
I think you're seeing a bunch of Liberal MPs start to wonder if Justin Trudeau might not harm their ability to get re-elected.
And we're in a minority government.
We could be entering an election cycle this fall.
And a lot of those Liberal MPs in Southern Ontario are starting to look at poll numbers and wonder if Prime Minister Trudeau is the right man to lead them into the next election.
You know, and I think there could be a secondary motive for not speaking up to defend the prime minister.
And I think that might be because it might focus attention on that specific MP.
For example, we know Bill Mourneau is ensnared in all of this.
And I don't know how deep the layers of that onion go.
So I would be immediately skeptical of an MP who moved to defend Trudeau.
I would say, okay, I'm going through your portfolio now.
I'm going to go through, you know, if you're the heritage minister, whatever, I'm going to start tearing through that to see if there's any contracts or dealings there or dealings with their own family.
So I think a lot, maybe some of them are just keeping their mouths shut just to make sure that they don't end up with a little bit more scrutiny than they normally would get.
And I think you're absolutely right, Sheila, that in this case, since the scandal is still unfolding, we don't entirely know the full scope of the issues that are being looked at now by the Ethics Commission or by other independent groups.
In the case, though, of the Liberal MPs, it might also be the calculus that if you come out too strongly in support of the prime minister in a scandal that ends up being fatal to his leadership, you get tarred with that going into the next administration.
And maybe you end up as a casualty if the new leader decides that the only way around a scandal is to clean house.
So I think there's a lot of political calculus being done on the part of liberal MPs right now.
But one thing is clear, which is, you know, it's yet another liberal scandal involving ethics, involving inappropriate actions, not on the part of a backbench liberal MP or even a junior cabinet minister,
but the very top echelons of the liberal government, the prime minister, the finance minister, the chief of staff, all of these people are intimately linked to the we charity and are therefore being caught by the same brush of inappropriate behavior that people are now uncovering with this charity.
Now, let's move to something else that's sort of happening while the we scandal is unfolding.
And it's unfortunate, I think, that it's happening at the same time because I feel that the Conservative Party is not able to fully capitalize and damage the liberal brand because they don't have a leader right now.
So I wanted to ask you about the leadership race, how you think it's going.
It's a very different leadership race than we've seen.
We've got, you know, two outsiders, one sort of reminiscent of Harper, and then one sort of reminiscent of the PCs of old.
And so I think that it's sort of a real turning point for the future of the party.
I know a lot of people are reminiscing about Harper.
Where's Harper?
Can he come back?
So I think O'Toole might capitalize on that.
A lot of people are looking for someone from the outside who might shake things up a little.
I know those people would likely lean more towards Lewis and Sloan.
And then there's, I don't know, Peter McKay.
I just, I'm having a tough time getting excited by Peter McKay.
I think he maybe feels like this is his turn and maybe that's why he's doing it.
I don't know.
I'd love to ask him, but he doesn't like to talk to us.
You know, which maybe is telling in how he sees himself within the broader conservative movement.
I'll be honest, I was very disappointed when the Conservative Party decided to soldier on with this leadership race while COVID was locking us all down.
I know that there's this concern that there could be a snap election any day, and therefore we have to go ahead with the leadership race.
And they're all still feeling, I think, a little burnt from the very lengthy race that happened last time, and they wanted to avoid that.
But it's meant that some of the candidates, I'm going to say, I think probably Dr. Leslie Lewis in particular, didn't get as much time to meet with members, to sell new memberships.
And it also meant that we had fewer people in this leadership race than we might otherwise have because they kept the deadlines so aggressive while COVID was happening.
So I'm personally a little disappointed that the Conservative Party didn't delay the leadership race to give members more opportunity to meet with candidates and to sell new memberships.
That being said, I guess we're going into a vote.
It's happening now.
People are getting their ballots.
I think Peter McKay is running because he never really got to be PC party leader when he won back in 2003.
That leadership lasted only for a few months before the new Conservative Party of Canada was formed.
You have Aaron O'Toole, who I think is running more closely to the Harper ticket.
He was a Harper cabinet minister and sort of espousing this fairly safe position for the Conservative Party.
I think the bigger problem, though, the Conservative Party has is looking at how many people say they're open to voting for the Conservative Party.
And right now, that number is, in some cases, under 40%, which means that even if they got every single vote of people who might possibly vote conservative, it still isn't enough to get the Conservatives into majority government territory, particularly given how weak the New Democrats are under leader Jang Ying Singh.
And so I think it's why people are starting to look at Leslie Lewis and others as an alternative, because they see it as a shake-up.
They see it as a way of changing perceptions about the Conservative Party.
And I think that's a great conversation to have.
I don't know if Leslie Lewis is the right person for that.
I'm a little bit nervous that the fact that she's never been an elected official before creates a real problem or challenge for her.
But I think, you know, if there's one word I would choose to describe this leadership race, it would be sort of uninspiring.
That's my personal opinion.
Yeah.
And, you know, we could have, I think maybe the potential for a surprise is in all of this because Leslie Lewis has the potential to be a lot of people's second choice, particularly with the Sloan people.
I think she could be a second choice with the O-Tool people.
And of course, she's a first choice for her own people.
So, you know, she has the potential to do really well.
And I think that speaks to the false narrative about the Conservative Party that you hear from the liberal camp, that, you know, it's not diverse, that they don't care about women in politics, that we, you know, were racist by the nature of being conservative.
But, you know, we have accomplished woman of color on our side of the aisle running to be the leader.
And she's a serious contender.
And I think that the fact that the media and the liberals still treat the conservative movement as though it's behind the times while defending the man who wore blackface at least three times, it's a sad state of affairs here in Canada.
And I think that's a great segue into why we need the independent press gallery.
And Aaron O'Toole so far has said that he will recognize the Independent Press Gallery, a venture by Candace Malcolm and the folks at True North, this press gallery that basically all you have to do is not take government money and you can think for yourself and you can join.
I think that's also going to be a real game changer.
And I think it's going to put a lot of people on their toes in Ottawa.
I certainly hope so.
I think you, you know, what's so interesting, I read a Globe and Mail article about the We charity situation the other day.
And at the bottom of the Globe article was a disclaimer that said that the Globe and Mail was a media partner of the We charity and they wanted people to know that.
And then I thought to myself, but they're also getting hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of taxpayer funding from the liberal government, who is having a scandal with the we charity, who they're a media partner for.
And my goodness, haven't we reached the point where our mainstream media has become so tied up in the people that they're supposed to be holding to account, how on earth could we expect them to do that hard work and to be tough when they're taking money from a bunch of different groups and are involved with a bunch of different groups who are highly questionable.
So I'm looking, I think that the Independent Press Gallery has some really big things that it wants to accomplish.
The first is right now, media have been able to sort of gang up, media and politicians have been able to gang up on independent media, deny them the right to attend certain press conferences and press events.
You would think that mainstream media will be champions for independent journalists coming to cover these things.
Well, the answer is no.
They look at independent media as the poor cousins that frankly don't play the game the way they're supposed to.
Certainly, the prime minister has gone out of his way and his government has gone out of their way to keep independent media from covering major events.
I know both the Rebel and True North had to sue their way into covering, being able to cover the federal leaders' debates during the last federal election because the Liberal government fought tooth and nail to prevent it.
So I'm hoping that the whole strength by numbers argument is one of the things that the Independent Press Gallery will have going for it.
It's no longer going to be a random series of independent media voices trying on their own.
There's going to be a group of people working together to advance the cause of better journalism in Canada.
And so, you know, the other thing I think is so funny is just how out of date the parliamentary press gallery is when it comes to how they recognize media.
These are people who, first of all, didn't want to let television into the parliamentary press gallery.
They don't want to, they don't recognize that, you know, journalism is now an online endeavor.
They fought, you know, prevent online journalists from getting the same kind of access as others, but they've always been backwards.
In fact, I think at one point they even wouldn't let women into the parliamentary press gallery.
So this is not a group who has a record of being at the forefront of advancing the cause of journalism in Canada.
They've been just the opposite.
So now we have a choice.
You can go with the status quo and the mainstream media, or you can support the group who actually want to ask the hard questions.
And to your credit, Sheila, a group of journalists in the mainstream media who often take the work you've done and then make it their own and claim that they wrote the story when we know that it was actually you who came up with that story first.
Calgary's Tax Hike Controversy00:08:40
Yeah, and I'm not special.
They do that, do all of us.
And then they claim that they need, for example, in the CBC's case, $1.5 billion to basically newsjack what I did.
Now let's, I want to move on to another area of your expertise, and that is the city of Calgary and how out of control the City of Calgary City Council is.
Save Calgary, the little advocacy group that could, you guys have found eight different tax hikes and revenue grabs, tax grabs, fees, that the city of Calgary is imposing on the long-suffering taxpayers of Calgary, homeowners of Calgary, facilities users in Calgary, in the midst of, and I say this all the time,
the worst economic downturn in probably 100 years.
And yet the city still has their hands in people's pockets.
It's unbelievable.
You know, you would think during these incredibly tough times where unemployment is possibly as high as 25%, it's hard to tell because so many people have just left the workforce at this moment because they were unable to find jobs.
So we don't really know, but government estimates have been as high as 25%.
That one in three office towers in downtown Calgary are completely vacant.
You'd think that city council's focus would be trying to do whatever it could to kickstart economic growth right here in the city, but you would be wrong.
Instead, they commissioned a financial task force and they gave that task force two jobs.
One, to find ways where they could, places where they could save money, places they could cut spending, places where they could achieve savings.
And two, they asked for revenue tools, which is how you say taxes, new taxes in government speech, in order to provide a more predictable funding framework for the city.
Now, they kind of didn't do that first one very well.
There's a lot of words like synergy and collaborate to talk about how they're going to find savings.
They didn't really recommend a lot of places to cut, but they did come up with a whole bunch of new ways to tax Calgarians.
And we, you know, there's more than eight.
In fact, there's probably dozens if you go through the 60-some page report that they put out.
But we highlighted eight increasingly crazy taxes that the city wants to put on the backs of hardworking Calgarians.
And our big worry is Calgarians just weren't going to know, because if you didn't read the 60-page report buried in the middle of a 300-page agenda package, you might not know that the city of Calgary wants to hike your electricity bill or tax you every time you take an Uber or a taxi or tax you for working from your own home.
That's one of the proposals being looked at by the city right now.
That is shocking.
So many people forced to work at home.
They don't have a choice.
If you want to keep working, you got to work at home.
And the city's like, you know what?
Let's get those people while they're down.
It's horrible.
And then, you know, it's to go after people who are taking an Uber to work or, you know, it's just, it's so gross.
Like, I don't even have words to describe how revolting it is, especially when Calgary is like ground zero for Western economic destruction.
There's a couple myths that city council and the mayor like to spend when they talk about fiscal issues.
The first is they like to say that they've cut spending.
Well, that's not true.
How the city cut spending is different than how you or I cut spending.
When we cut spending, we look at our grocery bills.
Say last month it was $200.
This month it's $150.
So to us, that's a cut.
But the city looks at it and says, well, we spent $200 this month.
We planned to spend $300 next month.
But now we're only going to spend $250.
They call that a cut, even though spending is going up.
The second thing, and when I say spending is going up, over a 10-year period, the city is now spending $1 billion more a year than it was in 2010.
In fact, that spending figure is now perilously close to $4 billion a year.
It's staggeringly high.
The second thing is, where are they spending the money?
A lot of it is going to salaries, wages, pensions, and benefits.
Those have increased.
The cost of that has increased by more than 40% over the last 10 years.
Some of it is because they've simply hired more people, about 2,000 more people to work at the city of Calgary.
But they're also paying everybody more.
And as more and more people retire, their pension obligation is going up and up.
It used to be 200 million 10 years ago.
Now it's 500 million.
And it's only going to keep climbing.
The third thing they like to say is that Calgary pays some of the lowest property taxes.
Well, that's not true.
The city put out a chart showing where Calgary was, and it was smack dab in the middle.
And that's assuming that they've calculated all of the extra fees that Calgarians pay for things like garbage collection, which are included in property taxes that people pay in other cities.
So these are all the little myths that the city of Calgary has spun, leading them to the point where they say, well, we just need more taxes.
We don't have enough money to run the city we want to run, to provide the services we want to give.
And we laid out eight potential areas that they're looking at for tax items.
But there's even more than that.
This financial task force looked at all of the cities in North America and they identified things those cities are doing in order to raise taxes.
And two of the things they found were some cities put on a municipal income tax.
So you actually have to pay a percentage of your income to the city.
And other cities put on a municipal sales tax.
So those are two things that the city at the outside is also looking at.
You could pay 5% of your income to the city of Calgary or a 1% or 2% sales tax on every single thing you buy.
But what they haven't done is look at ways where they can save money.
And they know that the place to save money is in workforce and labor costs, but they're too afraid of the big public sector unions to tackle that.
So instead, they're just going to put taxes onto the backs of Calgarians.
Yeah, and what a boom to Okatoksa and Airdrie if the city of Calgary brings in their own municipal sales tax.
I mean, businesses will just relocate outside of city limits and people will be more inclined to live in Airdrie and live in Okatokes, where it'll be a little bit more affordable and you can sort of escape the clutches of Nenshi and his tax and spend ways.
Now, you guys have a petition, do you not, to fight this?
Well, you're right.
Now, the good news is the city doesn't have the power under the law to implement many of these new taxes.
They can do some of them, but a lot of them require the provincial government's approval.
And so Safe Calgary started a petition urging Casey Minister Casey Madhu, who we think is doing a great job and the government of Alberta not to give Calgary the ability to raise one additional new tax.
We think Calgarians are already overtaxed.
They're taxed to death.
They're already struggling to make ends meet, to pay their mortgages, pay their monthly bills.
We're asking Minister Madhu and the Alberta government not to give in the City Hall tax round that this council is trying to foist onto the backs of Calgarians.
Certainly on our website, safecalgary.com, you can see our petition.
You can sign it.
You can help be part of the campaign to stop this outrageous series of taxes that city council and the mayor want to stick Calgarians with.
And I mean, you guys at Safe Calgary, you are the most effective municipal watchdog organization, I would say, in Canada, if not probably all of continental North America.
You guys, nearly single-handedly, you and maybe two or three other organizations stopped an Olympic bid that was all but a done deal.
And so when you say that you are organizing to stop something or put pressure on the municipal government, it is very effective and you help amplify the voices of the people, the people that politicians don't want to listen to.
How do people support Safe Calgary and sign up for those incredibly well-written email blasts?
Dolly Parton's Legacy00:04:00
Well, great for asking.
They can go to safecalgary.com, which is our website.
There, you can sign up to our weekly newsletter.
We just put out a video featuring some young Calgarians who are helping to raise awareness about these crazy new taxes that City Hall is trying to create.
Safecalgary.com is also where you can sign that petition.
And we hope that you take a read and just understand the crazy tax type agenda that City Hall is actively pursuing right now.
You can also follow us on all of our social media on Facebook, on Twitter, Save Calgary.
If you search for that, you'll find both of them.
And if you have the ability, which is hard now to ask for money here of Calgary taxpayers because they've already had their pocket picked so much on the City Council.
But if you have a few dollars that they haven't taken, Safe Calvin really appreciates the support of everyday Albertans because we don't get government funding unlike Bay Unions and other left-wing groups.
Now, I'm going to ask you about something before you go that is near and dear to my heart and to yours, Dolly Parton.
And you didn't know I was going to ask you about this, but you have a petition to rename the Nashville Airport in favor of Dolly Parton.
And I love her.
I think she has done more to combat poverty than most governments out there through her childhood literacy efforts and her job creation efforts.
When you see her talk about Dollywood, she says, well, I built it to be the job creator in the region.
My people needed jobs.
People will come here to see me.
So I built Dollywood.
And, you know, just she's just a wonderful lady.
And I would love to see her honored while she's still alive to be flattered by it.
And you have sort of started something on your own time that I would love to signal boost.
Well, I think you're right.
I'm a big admirer of Ms. Parton.
I think, you know, apart from being a very gifted performer, one of the most decorated, award-winning, and best-selling country music artists of all times, she's also trying to do her best to help the community that she was born and raised in.
You know, she came from a very humble background.
She was one of a dozen children.
Her father was illiterate.
And so she created a literacy program to help poor kids be able to read.
And so I think to myself, gosh, we name things after politicians all the time.
A lot of those politicians weren't great.
They just got their name on things because they happened to be a mayor or they happened to be a governor.
And I think, well, why don't we actually name something after someone who's really made a great contribution, both through her music and through her philanthropy and through her charitable work?
I'm hoping they name Nashville's airport the Dolly Parton International Airport.
I mean, how fun would it be to fly into Nashville and hear the pilot outside, you know, we've begun our descent into Dolly Parton Airport?
Oh, she, and, you know, you're so right to put out that, you know, the politicians get their names put on stuff just by virtue of they got elected to something.
What I love about Dolly is you don't know if she's on the left or the right, and she doesn't want to talk about it and she shuts down interviewers because she doesn't want to alienate people from either side.
And she seems to be universally loved by people on the left and by people on the right because she does that.
And I think it is your neat little petition.
I think it's on change.org.
We'll put a link to it.
I think it's just kind of fun because who could be upset about Dolly Parton's name on the Nashville airport?
That's my thinking.
I decided I needed at least one cause that wasn't controversial or that descended into partisan politics.
I think we can all agree that Dolly Parton is a fantastic woman and we'd all be better off if we named Nashville Airport after her.
Well, I wish you the best of luck and I was very proud to sign that petition and to share it and I hope everybody does the same.
All Politics Are Local00:01:06
William, thanks so much for coming on the show.
I'll try to get down to Calgary and see you and the folks at Safe Calgary over the course of the summer and just enjoy the rest of your summer because winter comes very, very fast.
Well, thanks, Sheila.
Of course, you're always welcome here in Calgary.
We want more conservatives coming to this city.
So please, if you can, come on down and see us.
You got it, William.
Friends, I say it all the time, but all politics are truly local.
And your municipal government is the level of government that affects you the most and affects you first.
You notice right away if your garbage isn't picked up and you notice that big, huge property tax bill, don't you?
But we really don't seem to pay attention to the ideological leanings of our municipal politicians.
And I think it's time we do.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.