Elections Alberta

We'll start with Corey.

I just want to remind everybody, yeah, we've got a referendum coming, and this, regardless of which way people might vote, is shaping up to be a heck of a gong show because Elections Alberta appears to be completely incapable of managing it.

They sent out 300,000 advanced ballots.

It sounds like there's not the right amount of ballots.

It's some envelopes, but even worse, there's an attestation that people have to sign saying that, I don't want to go too far in the weeds with this, but it's from the prior legislation saying that you couldn't get an advance ballot unless you had a special reason.

So Elections Alberta said, well, just scratch that out and then send it back.

And it's causing confusion, you know, and seniors and so on are getting this because it says you can be charged criminally if you don't sign this.

Like, how hard is it? When you're sending out 300,000 of something to have somebody just read the copy and say, hey, wait a minute, that doesn't belong there.

And, and I think asking the, that question about what do you expect the outcome to be is, is essential.

And what he found, I think, should be setting off alarm bells i- in all of our heads because if you do walk into this with the expectation that the option B is, is gonna get, you know, 57% and the actual outcome is 28%, you add that to the, you know, to put it kindly, missteps of, of the administration of the referendum so far by Elections Alberta, and, you know, the first question is gonna be, was this a, a, a proper result, right? Can we trust the outcome?

You can hear the murmurings about that already everywhere.

Absolutely.

[suspenseful music] Do you read me? This is podcast.

What the heck is going on at Elections Alberta? And what would happen to the economy if an export tax was imposed on Alberta oil and gas? I'm Sheila Gunn-Reid, and you're watching The Gunn Show.

[suspenseful music] There is a resounding chorus of people, from NDP leader, David Lewis, to former UCP premier here in Alberta, Jason Kenney, to, uh, someone I thought was nearly deceased, Jean Chrétien, former Liberal prime minister of this country, calling for an enormous export tax to be imposed on Western Canadian oil and gas into the United States as part of an ongoing trade dispute.

You see these same voices, many of them, Jason Kenney excluded, have previously stated that there's, you know, no real business case for Canadian oil and gas.

Makes no sense.

It's cognitively dissonant, but that's never stopped these people before.

And then, there's mayhem, [laughs] with the mail-in ballots over at Elections Alberta as we approach the independence vote.

It's a mess.

So what's happening is that this is going to be probably one of the most administratively complicated ballots to administer.

I've heard that Elections Alberta is looking for upwards of 60,000 poll workers in order to get things moving, and as a result, we're expecting this to be a mess with hours-long lineups, which may have the effect of pushing down voter turnout and increasing the probability of a vote in favor of having the vote to leave.

Anyway, long story short, the way that some of us are trying to get around this is we're trying to help make this more efficient, is we're encouraging everybody to get advance ballots.

You can go to the Elections Alberta website and request an advance mail-in ballot so that you can avoid the lines.

Great.

Super.

Oh.

And if you lie about that, you can be subject to all kinds of fines.

You know, you look into it a little bit more and he it's like there.

aren't really a ton of great answers by any of these people as to why their emails have been used in this way or why you know Rory's investigation kept leading them back to this but that's so this is like you're gonna have bad actors kind of always right and and you can't really defend against that but what we can do is have better laws and regulations and this is where I think it gets really damning for ourselves because Rory also contacted Elections Alberta to be like, yo, there's all this deep fake stuff that's going on and trying to sway in one way or another Albertans vote.

Right.

And the spokesperson said, that spoke to Rory basically said that none of the deep fake laws apply to images of the public.

And they haven't even clarified whether Elections Alberta will look into these websites.

And that is where I think is the real thing here is that, you know, we're always going to have bad actors who are going to take advantage of the holes we've got in the protective armor around our democracy.

But increasingly, um we need to ensure that there aren't any holes in our armor and it's like we know that there are these gaps and these giant oversights where our regulations aren't covering off and yet we're not shoring up our defensives like here and we're just allowing ourselves to be swayed and then the other aspect of this that i think is really worrying and this is you know i'll end my rant here is that um Rory did this on his own like this was a journalist doing their journalistic thing right it wasn't our government it wasn't our government agencies that found this so like the extent and the scale of this sort of operation is really worrying and it we should all be worried if our last line of defense against this is a plucky investigative reporter and not our own government agencies

But in order to really get that fixed you're looking at a complete dismantle of the system which is something that's not going to happen so what's our next best option is using the referendum process that danielle smith gave us which i agree the referendum question would have been better if it was stay free alberta's question but if you guys forget already that that question was struck down by a liberal judge and is currently in appeal which we're probably going to win the appeal but we would have never ever been able to have a vote on something by October 19th if we wait for that appeal.

Though our government does support Alberta remaining in Canada, we think that today's decision by the court will deny opportunity to well over 300,000 Albertans to have their petition verified by Elections Alberta.

We think that this decision is incorrect in law and anti-democratic, and we will be appealing it as a result.

So this is the next best thing.

You can't have a 20% increase.

Uh, Elections Alberta kicking in their public relations campaign in overdrive.

Jason Kenney going after influencers, uh, Lake America and a few other things.

So, uh, Let's steer it whichever way you guys want to go.

Actually...

I want to talk about this for a second.

How many people got this in the mail this week? If you live in Alberta, right? I've been in Alberta my whole life just about, and I've been through many elections, and I've never seen Elections Alberta so nervous about an upcoming election or referendum to the point where they sent us this.

This is a 14-page document.