Episode 1008: Debriefed

Zain 0:01

This is a Strategist episode 1008. My name is Zain Velji. With me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan. Guys, how

Zain 0:09

how are you? How are you doing? How is one of us in particular doing? Corey, how are you?

Corey 0:18

It was a good night. I got to watch election results from BC, which

Corey 0:22

which I had no stake in, so I felt pretty calm about the whole affair. How are you? Did you see the BC election results? I

Zain 0:27

I didn't. I also didn't have a stake. So I had my phone in a yonder pouch while I was watching John Mulaney talk about being back from rehab. And I don't know why I went to go see John Mulaney. He looks and sounds exactly like you, Corey. Carter, did you have any stake whatsoever in the B.C. elections or anything going on in that province? Nope.

Corey 0:51

Excellent. Yeah, that is

Zain 0:52

is what I thought. Carter, you were on a campaign in Surrey. Interesting race in Surrey. I just was very fascinated to watch it.

Zain 1:05

Give us the take. What happened? How did it transpire? And did the candidate that had the bus ultimately win? And is that the tell-all for next time? Yeah,

Carter 1:16

Yeah, the candidate that did the most Burma shaves and had their own bus did win. So politics

Carter 1:23

politics is upside down. Everything is wrong.

Carter 1:26

Yeah, I think that overall,

Carter 1:29

overall, it was an interesting campaign. I think that from my point of view, it reinforces that there's four types of campaigns. campaigns.

Carter 1:36

There's the campaign that you should win, but you lose. The campaign that you should lose, but you win. The

Carter 1:43

The campaign that you're going to win almost no matter what you do. And

Carter 1:47

And the campaign you're going to lose for sure.

Carter 1:51

think with hindsight, I fit into the last category. We were going to lose for sure.

Carter 1:58

South Asian population jumped in behind Doug McCallum in a big way, which was really unexpected. The guy was pulling it like

Carter 2:05

nothing for most of the race. And, uh, and

Zain 2:07

and this was the incumbent, just so I'm clear, right?

Carter 2:10

So the three people that came, uh, that came one, two, and three were all Caucasian.

Carter 2:16

And, uh, the guy who came in third, like honest to God, like no word of a lie, you could not find his campaign anywhere, except he did hire an airplane to pull a banner that gordy hogue for mayor and that appears to have done it that appears to have been that in his name is gordy hogue um seems

Carter 2:34

seems to have been enough for him to come in third the

Corey 2:37

the two planes south

Carter 2:38

south asian candidates came in uh quite

Zain 2:43

losses carter can i ask you hindsight

Zain 2:46

hindsight you place yourself in that fourth category do

Zain 2:50

you mind me asking you where you thought you were prior to that which one of the four candidate models did you think you were prior to the results becoming so clear and hindsight, of course, being 2020? Did you think you were the should win or which? Yeah, I'll let you kind of answer that. I thought

Carter 3:07

thought we were in the we could win category.

Carter 3:11

You know, we could lose, we could win. I did not go into it with 100% confidence that we were going to win.

Carter 3:18

And the reason for that was there was two sets of data.

Carter 3:20

And the two sets of data were were polling

Carter 3:23

polling data, which showed us very clearly in third

Carter 3:28

third place, fourth place.

Carter 3:31

Our internal polls, we were able to get up to second place, but it was tough

Carter 3:35

tough for us. And then there was this feedback on the ground.

Carter 3:41

And I think you guys know feedback on the ground data is actually usually called lies. eyes. And so, uh, yeah,

Carter 3:50

we were, we were getting tremendous feedback from the ground. Um, unions were making calls, uh, the South Asian population. We had, I bet you, we had 150 callers on Saturday making phone calls within the South Asian population. It

Carter 4:05

It was a big, big operation. And it would appear that we got Doug McCallum's vote out like top notch. They all went out and then voted for for doug they did not vote for us um we could see that the union vote was about 4 000 people we were hoping for 15 um

Carter 4:20

um south asian we were hoping for 15 to 20 and we wound up i think getting about six there's still a lot more analysis to do on on everything um but ultimately this this fits into the fourth category i i never thought we were going to win it going away um but

Carter 4:37

but i definitely thought we were going to be closer her well

Corey 4:41

it's it's going to be an interesting one i'll be keen to hear and maybe you'll share on this show what what some of that debrief looks like because it

Corey 4:49

it is true that defeat can be a better teacher than

Corey 4:53

um victory you can say everything was good it

Carter 4:56

it would be fun to do the same episode that we did after the uh the calgary election you

Carter 5:01

you know where we kind of debriefed it all now we didn't we didn't stay as up to date on this one i didn't do that that

Carter 5:07

that you know here's what's going on in the campaign with you guys that we did in Calgary. But I think I can still be as honest as I was on that one, right? And there were

Carter 5:18

were turning points in the campaign where we knew that this was going to cause problems. The biggest one was, when will the candidate announce? I thought she should have been in no later than April.

Carter 5:31

I would have preferred March, but she came in in mid-June with the assurance that no one goes on vacation in Surrey and people pay attention to politics over the summer.

Carter 5:43

Both of those things, if you're keeping track at home, incorrect. So we

Carter 5:49

we just never had traction because we campaigned when people didn't give a shit. And we

Carter 5:54

we gave away the

Carter 5:56

the time that they did to the moment we wound up winning. that's

Carter 6:00

that's just one thing and i'll probably be able to bring uh

Carter 6:04

uh five or six other things that that we made decisions to do that that uh didn't

Carter 6:09

didn't really pan out you

Zain 6:11

know what i'm gonna actually use this as a jumping off point to our first segment our first segment why did it go so wrong carter i'm not talking about your candidate but i do want to god

Carter 6:22

said a future episode

Zain 6:24

you're doing to me here killing

Zain 6:25

killing me i'm giving an official i'm gonna i'm giving an official title too by the way i didn't even mention the candidate just so if people want to look up the results jenny sims right finished fourth in that race we're sorry yep

Zain 6:35

very forward i want to talk about the party banner we'll talk about that later but this is actually really interesting that that this is the the conversation off the top and it's not about uh football or flare airlines or afl um but i do want to talk about a different campaign debrief the ndp the federal ndp have issued their campaign debrief they put it out quietly on the party's website earlier this year. Much earlier

Corey 6:59

earlier this year, yeah.

Zain 6:59

Yeah, much earlier this year, and CBC reporting about it, I believe, this weekend, over the course of this weekend, which I think opens up a pathway for us to dovetail on Carter's commentary here to talk about campaign debriefs, their effectiveness, their usefulness, their purpose, when they're best done. But before I jump into that, I'm actually going to stick with Carter for a second, Corey, if that's okay with you. Carter, you know, you are giving us some really raw reflections here. And I can't help but notice that this, I shouldn't say in contrast, but that the document produced by the NDP was a very methodical process. They kind of have an interview list of where they went, how they went. You know, they probably took some time over the course of the summer, over the course of the year, one would imagine, to kind of interview these people.

Zain 7:47

Give me your philosophy on how you're going to do the campaign debrief for your candidate and for your campaign in Surrey. Are you going to do an extremely methodical or are you going to be like the, you know, perhaps are you a subscriber to the viewpoint that the best insights are gleaned immediately? And let's document those right away in terms of Corey's point. What's going to be the teacher, the longitudinal methodological deep dive or like put it all on paper right now? Who cares if it's exactly perfect because that's the real teacher. I'm kind of curious from your perspective, now that you're living kind of the moment that I want to examine in greater detail with the NDP.

Carter 8:23

I think that everything with time becomes worse because you start to create the legend of the campaign or the legend of the mistakes that were made versus

Carter 8:32

versus the truth of the mistakes that were made. It's super duper hard, especially after a loss, to look internally and say, OK, where were the decision points and what decisions did we make? And you'll have to kind of go back and actually read through your notes and make sure you understand it. But you can't wait a long time. You know, this for me, I'm flying home tomorrow. I'll have my notes of what we did wrong by the end of that flight. Because I'm going to go back through my notebook and make sure that I understand where we made the big decisions. I already mentioned one, right? The big decision of when we launched. That's actually a conversation point in this NDP document.

Carter 9:08

When should we launch? Right? Do we launch before? Are we running a year round campaign? Are we running a continuous campaign? I

Carter 9:14

mean, to be completely frank, that discussion about are we running a continuous campaign is about eight to 10 years old in Canadian politics. At least.

Carter 9:23

least. At least, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the NDP have suddenly found it. I think that they took too long. They took too many outside opinions when they probably knew the answers themselves. themselves. And then

Carter 9:40

then I think they fell into the trap of making sure that they appeared politically correct rather than trying to be politically successful.

Zain 9:49

You know, I'm going to get into the NDP. Corey, bear with me for one second, because I don't want to fall upon one thing. And I'll ask both of you about this, because let's get nerdy for a second. And I frankly think we can, because, I mean, we're not like other Canadian political podcasts. We do deep dive on the campaign side of it. Carter, you mentioned notes. Can I ask you, do you journal during a campaign? Like, Do you document key moments? Do you write down key reflections either on your phone, on paper? Because the entire thing can be such a blur. And even looking back on it in terms of just, in my case where I've worked on campaigns where I'm actually pushing out either products for advertising, you just produce so much you kind of forget about it. So even to look back on what you've done or the decisions that you made, do you kind of in the moment in the campaign, uh, make note of that for, for kind of professional development, if I can call it as such?

Carter 10:39

I don't do it that way. I do make sure that I am, I do write out a lot of the decision factors. Um, so I will, I will spend time writing out what I, um, you

Carter 10:53

you know, what are the options that I'm looking at and try and figure out which option is the best. success um so especially when it comes to money and i would argue that

Carter 11:03

that almost everything comes to money um so i will be putting down okay what what are we spending on these things how much is it going to cost me is this you know what are the other options that we have available to us and that kind of you

Carter 11:16

you know decision tree or decision option making is written down for me to go back then and review it's

Carter 11:21

it's not really a journal uh i don't kind of go okay you

Carter 11:25

you know this is how i'm feeling at this particular moment um

Carter 11:29

mean and because of that i probably have these rose colored glasses or certainly um some

Carter 11:35

some sort of a bias about how i'm feeling at any particular time but uh

Carter 11:38

uh i also have a tremendous amount of experience to make sure that i uh

Carter 11:44

know i make sure that i'm actually in this you know like because yeah the

Carter 11:48

the you know cory's mentioned the losses are where you learn things right like um

Carter 11:53

man i i don't i mean i think i learned a lot on on gondex campaign too because i

Carter 12:00

make sure to learn something from the campaigns right there's better people than me on most campaigns and you have to we i found crystal the graphic designer who helped me in in

Carter 12:11

in both uh the gondek campaign and the uh uh

Carter 12:15

uh surrey forward campaign You know, having professional looking design, I worked with another guy, Joel Grenz, uh, here in the Surrey Forward campaign. He did all our video work, you

Carter 12:25

you know, working with these people that are spectacular at their job. I mean, sure, it costs a little bit more money, but making,

Carter 12:31

making, you know, I used two, I used professionals for

Carter 12:35

for video this time and lost. And I really felt like that was the right decision. And I still think it's the right decision, even though I lost. So going

Carter 12:43

going back and looking at these things is still kind of a trick.

Zain 12:48

Yeah, you know, Carter mentions a couple of things that are interesting, and I'll bring them up in conversation later, especially around the relationships and the people that you get from the campaign, win or lose. You can really run a campaign, Corey, in a sense of it could be for the binary outcome of win or lose, or it could be for maybe creating an ecosystem of people that you get to work with again or see again, or maybe give them the spark of what a campaign could look like and they go on doing their own thing. But I'll pose the same question to you around documentation. Campaigns can be a blur, especially when you have so much to do, so many competing demands. And I think there's also, and maybe I'm getting too romantic here, but you don't know how long you get to play in the big leagues, so to speak, right? And so there's some elements of kind of writing it down, documenting it, and perhaps noting how special some of these campaigns and moments are. Corey, what have you done in the past in terms of documenting campaigns and whether it be for personal reflection or professional development.

Corey 13:49

Yeah. So on that last category, I don't do anything. I mean, it's actually

Corey 13:53

actually terrible. You would never know I ever worked in politics, ever worked in government. I have no pictures of my time there. I'm not remotely sentimental about that particular stuff. I know people who have walls of swag and different tchotchkes they've had from those jobs. I'm not that guy. I've got like two things both because they were handed to me framed already and i thought okay i guess i'll put them on the wall um

Corey 14:17

but i do try to document uh after a campaign like steven for a lot of the same reasons um the first is you

Corey 14:26

you you lose your feeling after the moment like you can recreate a lot of things but you can't recreate what you're feeling and what people are saying that day and the campaign

Corey 14:34

myth does come on pretty strong but

Corey 14:36

but in terms of actual documentation actual notes throughout it it's

Corey 14:40

it's really tough to do it's tough to do

Corey 14:43

for a few reasons and maybe i'll get to the campaign itself i'll start by saying i

Corey 14:48

usually have pretty good documentation pre-campaign i

Corey 14:51

i tend to work more provincial and federal campaigns so you've got the campaign period 28 days 35 days and

Corey 14:59

the reason i have better documentation actually has very little to do with my habits during the time and much more to do with the cadence of campaigns at that that moment so much more of the conversation occurs over email occurs over text message occurs through mechanisms that you can actually scroll back through and say oh yeah i wrote this strategy document then i got an email response about it and then we talked about it in this way when you get to the actual campaign and all cylinders are firing so many of the decisions are made in kind

Corey 15:26

ephemeral media right it's it's like a meeting you get together and you say what are we going to do today how we're going

Zain 15:31

going to do this

Corey 15:32

this and you have this 30-minute conversation and you're

Corey 15:35

you're on to the next thing and you move on

Zain 15:36

on and often that thing you've talked about in the morning needs to be produced in the afternoon not three weeks from now perhaps in the as it was in the pre-campaign phase absolutely and

Corey 15:46

and all all of us i don't just mean the three of us but i mean human beings we can be kind of guilty when we finish something we really like at work kind

Corey 15:55

kind of being like oh it was a great document and like reading it three

Corey 15:57

three additional times for absolutely no reason after it's been submitted or it's been applied or something and just you know almost

Corey 16:03

fetishizing our own work no time for that in a campaign so absolutely

Zain 16:07

absolutely no ability to

Corey 16:08

to kind of sit and reflect upon what you've actually done and what you've learned from it and

Corey 16:13

and um and very little email and that's not because

Zain 16:16

because things are off

Corey 16:16

off books it's because the decisions are being made at the moment in the room the person who's producing the thing is right next to you as you've discussed making it perhaps if you're the campaign manager uh right there so there's just not the same paper portrayal during a campaign which i think really speaks

Corey 16:33

speaks to steven's point about doing

Corey 16:35

doing what he's doing which is writing it on the campaign um you know on the flight home i was about to call it the campaign flight home but i'm

Corey 16:42

i'm guessing there's not a campaign plane no

Carter 16:45

siri for no yeah

Corey 16:47

and so that but

Corey 16:49

but i'll bet you anything too steven if it's two weeks old or older it's already falling into campaign myth like there's such a racist bias

Zain 16:57

these things are so

Corey 16:59

uh in the moment so um yeah documentation is uh is difficult in the moment also

Corey 17:06

also for the final reason there's just not time right

Corey 17:08

right like even if you wanted to do it during a campaign there's just not time you can't get those hours back during a campaign

Zain 17:14

cory can i ask you this do you wish you were more sentimental about the campaigns do you wish you'd kind of said you know even though this doesn't lend itself itself towards documentation even though this doesn't lend itself towards me writing it down that i wish and whether it be you know artifacts or whether it be memories or things you've documented do you wish you were more sentimental about this stuff no

Zain 17:34

no i don't give a shit i mean i

Corey 17:35

i am i'm like

Corey 17:36

like the mother of all purgers i'll just i'll throw out that cherished childhood memory like that if i haven't i don't know if you're

Zain 17:41

you're being sarcastic are

Zain 17:42

you actually being you've been serious here okay interesting yeah

Zain 17:45

and this is just like an extension

Corey 17:46

extension of your personality like It's

Zain 17:48

It's an extension of my,

Corey 17:49

but I do wish often that I had better track records of my time in government, my time on campaigns in terms of like the actual work that was produced and like, did that happen before that happened? And just, just because I think that would inform the way I think about things going forward, but it's, it's not because I want to have like memories from my grandchildren. It's because sometimes you're sitting here and you're having a conversation about government transition and you say, I

Corey 18:16

I did that, but I barely remember it. And, you know, I wish I had better

Zain 18:20

Carter, are you a bit more sentimental than Corey? Like,

Zain 18:23

seems like you are about this stuff. And I think I would probably be amongst the three of us, maybe the most sentimental. I mean, as witnessed by the lawn signs behind me of the campaign. I had an opportunity to work on. But it's not like, it's for no other reason, it's not like to be like established credibility or not. But like, even when I glance at them, they're like, those were tough periods of time working on those campaigns. but and some were wins some were losses like and but good memory so i'm kind of curious carter where you'd kind of put peg yourself on the sentimentality or the romance of these things i

Carter 18:55

i don't i'm not taking home any of the collateral i'm not taking home anything i have you

Carter 19:00

you know i think that we have a couple t-shirts but maddie's got those i i just don't i

Carter 19:05

don't grab anything first of all i don't wear anything during a campaign um

Carter 19:09

um so i'm not the campaign you never Never wear any

Zain 19:11

any of the campaign merch. No,

Zain 19:13

for school. Hate that.

Carter 19:15

No, I mean, it is just not

Carter 19:18

not what I'm supposed to be doing, right? My job is not to be moving the voters individually because of my presence. It's just not going to work.

Carter 19:31

I build good stuff, but I,

Carter 19:36

know, we take the digital files and that's it.

Zain 19:39

haven't even got to the NDP yet but I'm finding this quite fascinating and you guys can tell me to fuck off if you think this is a weird line of questioning but I'm going to do it anyways

Zain 19:48

you feel like that could be mistaken for lack of emotional investment in the outcome or the campaign

Zain 19:54

the very sort of like I'm not saying you're promoting like a very sanitary or antiseptic sort of like straight down the middle professional approach but do you need emotional investment in these things in order for them to be successful in your experience

Carter 20:09

don't know I think that I mean that's a really interesting question Zane um I don't

Carter 20:13

don't think I can have that level of emotional investment I think you have to be really detached otherwise you find yourself chasing these dreams right like there has to be someone who in the campaign who says no that's ridiculous we're not going to do that um right you know and and yeah

Carter 20:30

I don't want to be be caught

Carter 20:31

caught up in you

Carter 20:34

know this is this is how i feel this is what i'm thinking you know i'm so excited about what we're going to be doing tomorrow i mean i i think i portray a fairly decent level of excitement um right to

Carter 20:45

to the to the team i think that when

Carter 20:48

when people are involved in a in a campaign that i'm running they feel like i've i've really thought things through but i don't think that they feel like oh this is the you

Carter 21:00

carter's emotionally really emotionally invested in this i i like

Zain 21:04

like this is a passion project sort of thing you don't you don't give that sort of vibe off if that's fair to say yeah

Carter 21:09

yeah i mean i i i'm

Carter 21:10

i'm invested but i'm not you

Carter 21:13

know i'm not i'm not gonna lose sleep when we lose to be honest i mean do

Zain 21:18

cost you do you think that's ever like that that that or do you think that's actually saved you from from from more downstream negative impacts? There

Carter 21:26

There needs to be someone who says this isn't working.

Carter 21:30

There needs to be someone who says, just because this is the way you always do it does not mean that this is the right way that things get done.

Corey 21:38

Corey, any comments on this and I'll jump to the end of it. I think it's more than that. I think when you do it professionally like you do, Stephen, it's also you can't ride that roller coaster for decades.

Corey 21:49

That's true. At a certain point,

Corey 21:50

You need to be

Corey 21:51

be able to detach yourself professionally from kind of the personal emotions you may feel. And yeah, there's no high like winning on election night, even

Corey 21:58

you're trying to be detached, no question about it. But you

Corey 22:02

you can't live and die these things. You can't put your whole soul into everything you do for 30 years. That's just such a

Corey 22:12

a one-dimensional approach to life. You've

Corey 22:15

You've got to take a broader view of it.

Carter 22:16

I mean, everybody went on a Burma shave on Friday night. and people loved it you know horn to being honked fingers were being given thumbs

Carter 22:24

thumbs up were giving being done um i fucking hated it like it just was you

Carter 22:30

you know i'm not like why why

Zain 22:32

why why though this is interesting because you were over it like you you'd seen it one too many times or can i and this might be neither of these two or was it like and this is going to sound rude so but was it just like this isn't my candidate like i'm not like it was your candidate but you weren't so overly like This is not like a calling or a cause, this particular campaign. This

Carter 22:50

This is going to require an emotional investment greater than the emotional investment that I am prepared to make.

Corey 22:56

Interesting. Well, I think it's a little different too. I think that there is for some people who aren't on campaigns perpetually, there's a thrill to door knocking. There's a thrill to Burma Shaves. There's the excitement

Zain 23:05

excitement and the adrenaline.

Zain 23:07

One, it's who they get to do it with

Corey 23:08

with many times, Corey, right? Like the people they get to meet along the way, absolutely. On

Corey 23:12

On your 100th Burma Shave, how could you possibly give a shit? I think that's part of it too. I

Carter 23:17

I mean, you know how useless they are. You

Carter 23:19

You know that everybody who's honking isn't going to vote for you. You

Carter 23:22

You know that everybody who's giving you the finger is actually not voting for you.

Carter 23:25

And you reach this point of, okay, well, what are we actually trying to do here? What are we trying to achieve? And,

Carter 23:32

And, you know, my job, I always view my job as a strategy, not tactics. And

Carter 23:38

And when I'm drawn into tactical execution, it is generally meaning that there is a problem in the campaign because

Carter 23:45

because we do not have the tacticians from the volunteers or the other contractors that we require. buyer but

Corey 23:53

yeah listen you know i remember the

Corey 23:56

the first campaigns i ever worked on that adrenaline surge of meeting like even just riding presidents and grass in

Corey 24:03

in like a local sense in this sense of you know positions

Corey 24:06

positions now that i i don't know they feel almost dime a dozen and that's not fair because these are dedicated volunteers who are building things to try to make the community better but absolutely

Corey 24:16

you know there's a curve that you go on in these things as well So,

Zain 24:20

Are we sure? Yeah, okay. So, here's where we've concluded. You guys are cold-hearted, and I am overly earnest. We'll move it on to actually talk about what's at hand. What

Carter 24:28

What a shocking discovery. What a shock, I know. After knowing each other for 10 years. Well,

Zain 24:32

Well, yeah, what a shock. If you ever want anyone to be overzealous about anything, just throw it over to me. Yeah,

Zain 24:39

Back to our H&K days.

Zain 24:42

let's talk about this NDP document. So, Corey, I mentioned this earlier for folks who were listening about 20 minutes ago when I introduced this topic. The NDP put out their 2021 campaign debrief. They silently put it up online earlier this year, I should say. It was reported on this week by the CBC. This report, a 20-page PDF, breaks down the campaign on many different fronts, including operations, products, which is what I guess they call the materials produced, digital, media. media. I'm just going through a few other ones here that they have, what we heard, summary of debrief process. So they actually talked about the process itself.

Zain 25:20

Corey, let's talk top line. These sort of documents that come out months later, I was just talking to Carter about this, in the sense of the discerning between real insight versus mythology. What do you kind of see here in terms of the process that they followed? Would this lend more towards mythology or true insight in your mind?

Corey 25:42

Well, I think mythology, but I think it's more complicated than that because ultimately,

Corey 25:47

I don't believe that these kinds of debrief reports, particularly ones when the leader is maintained between elections, I

Corey 25:54

I don't actually believe they're true debriefs. They're like an internal management tool that's designed to make sure that everybody feels that they got heard. And listen, I'm going to illustrate this. This is from the

Corey 26:07

are the people they talk to. Central campaign team, including department exit reports and debriefs with department heads. EDA, that's Electoral District Association outreach, 182 survey submissions from the Electoral District Associations, nine regional roundtables, 26 candidate interviews. Caucus outreach, one listening session with NDP caucus, four individual meetings with caucus members. Governing body debrief activities, eight debrief sessions. Other debrief activities, two with external organizations, three with vendors. there's what's

Corey 26:35

what's fucking missing how about voters if you want to understand why people are or are not voting for you why

Zain 26:41

why don't you talk

Corey 26:42

talk to voters and not just the voters that voted for you but the voters that didn't and and if you ever needed kind of evidence that these reports have a purpose other than their stated report i i think that the list of people they talked to was a pretty strong indicator right

Zain 26:57

right like they were they were effectively trying to draw to a conclusion carter do you do you believe the same here with with something like this i'll ask the same question should I ask Corey? Mythology or actual insight based on this debate process that you see?

Carter 27:09

Mythology, to be sure. You're not actually interested in the outcome of the discussions. You're interested in the process to get there, which

Carter 27:18

which is fine too. I mean, I think Corey

Carter 27:21

Corey would agree that's not necessarily a bad thing. Still serves

Corey 27:25

serves a purpose. The

Carter 27:26

The purpose is just not the stated purpose. And the stated purpose for this document is to make their elections better when

Carter 27:34

when some of the conclusions are you

Carter 27:37

know okay one of them is we should test our creative before really

Carter 27:43

mean like this how are you not um

Carter 27:45

um you know trying to you know like we

Carter 27:48

we shouldn't taste you know test our creative like what decade are you in um

Corey 27:53

oh yeah like the superficiality of all of this you know there was one page of recommendations that would you know could be summarized as hire more communicate more train more fund more start earlier here yeah

Corey 28:06

okay yeah exactly what are you going to do less of you know because this is a zero-sum world you only have so many dollars you only have so many hours and there's no sense of we've

Corey 28:15

we've got to prioritize these things a little bit differently it's it's like well

Corey 28:18

well do each part of your job better is the summary of this report the

Carter 28:22

the leaders tour is great hang on a second i'm not gonna give this up the leaders tour more leaders tour okay

Carter 28:28

okay are you making making more leaders? Like, how are you going to?

Zain 28:33

if you're the green party, if

Zain 28:34

you're the green party, you can have some co-leaders, Carter. They may

Carter 28:38

may have already solved

Carter 28:39

How are you going to physically do it? Because there's one guy and he's going to be, and he's exhausted at the end, no matter what. So how is it that you, that you have this more

Carter 28:49

more leader tour? I mean, I guess you can start it earlier, but again, you're, you're now you're exhausting him earlier.

Carter 28:57

It's quite a document. There is no trade-offs. There's no expected outcome from the changes either. We're going to change these things, but there's no expected outcome from when we make these actual changes.

Zain 29:11

Corey, would you have preferred, let's

Zain 29:12

let's say the NDP said we want to engage in a debrief process. And

Zain 29:17

And what did you call this? You said this is not a debrief. This is an internal management tool. It's an internal management tool.

Zain 29:21

tool. I'll get back to that in a second in terms of what a value of that could be like, because Carter and you are both right. It serves a purpose. We'll get to that purpose.

Zain 29:28

If you wanted a true debrief, Corey, you

Zain 29:31

you mentioned voters, but I'd even go earlier

Zain 29:34

earlier in the process. Would you have just had one person you trust within the party to say, you know what? You observed this campaign. You either lived it, you observed it. We value your insight. It could be you, Corey. It could be you, Carter. starter, can

Zain 29:49

can you guys write the 20 pages for us around what we need to do? And we can debate that, but I'll actually have some opinion rather than converging towards, I would hate to say platitudes, but platitudes as recommendations. And this is not about this particular NDP report. This is about how these things are done in general. Would you be open to that, Corey? Do you think a single author is where we need to go with some of these things?

Corey 30:12

Well, it's an interesting idea. It's not Not one I had thought of. My instant reaction when you started was no, because no one single person sees enough of a campaign. And so you do need to have other people. But the

Corey 30:23

the idea of having not just an author, because in a way, an author is like aggregate all of these into a consistent document. But like an opinion and a voice that says, this is what I believe you should have done.

Corey 30:36

Maybe. Maybe, like maybe somebody needs to sit there and say, okay, I've got to sift through this and almost like a judge determine what I thought worked well and what I thought didn't work well and having some

Corey 30:47

judgments. And, you know, often when I do this in my own job, when I'm writing like a report with a strategy or whatnot, I will write it like a, like kind of like a judicial opinion where it's section one, number, these are the facts, right? Number two, this is my analysis that's layered on top of it. And then the third section is, and so I've come to these conclusions. And then when you talk with somebody, you say, okay, do you think my facts are wrong? Do you think my analysis is wrong? Or do you think something's missing?

Corey 31:14

otherwise, what conclusions? Or, you know, I suppose the logic train as well. um

Corey 31:20

and so maybe if campaigns took a bit more of that approach and actually tried to show some of these through lines more aggressively it would be a little bit more of a document but stepping

Corey 31:28

stepping back i think you are never going to have a sincere uh

Corey 31:32

uh here's what we heard document uh you know campaign debrief document if

Corey 31:37

if it's a public document and you

Zain 31:40

you know steven is is

Corey 31:40

is a big fan of open sourcing strategy that's

Corey 31:44

that's fine but he doesn't open source all of the messy conversations he had to get to that strategy. And that's essentially what a campaign debrief document is trying to do.

Corey 31:52

Like, think about the constraints on this NDP one. And yeah, we're using this to illustrate because in my experience, this is every debrief document,

Zain 31:58

right? Yes, yes. They're very, you could guess the conclusions.

Zain 32:03

Or if you were presented with them, they would all kind of make sense as general sort of. Other

Corey 32:08

Other thing is these conclusions would work, almost all of them for any party, right? But you can't be too critical of the leader. You can't say the EDAs had a bunch of, you know, terrible incompetent presidents. You can't say, you know, the candidates were absolute shit in Alberta, which was not, I'm not, this is not specific. This is general,

Corey 32:30

Yeah, yeah. And you just can't be honest. I mean, I pulled this quote up while you were talking. It was from here and it was mentioned in the CBC article. This is a longer version. This is just attributed to generic central campaign staffer.

Corey 32:43

It's like someone is drowning. warning jagmeet is very caring and genuinely understands what the person is going through he then tells the mother leaders cannot help but he didn't throw them a buoy a rope that gives them the hope of getting out there something concrete to hold on to something clear and real that will change things for canadians day-to-day life so

Corey 32:58

so rather than just saying in like one sentence our policy didn't actually speak to people people they didn't speak to in this debrief again i'll remind you right they

Corey 33:09

they instead spend half the time talking about what a caring and lovely person this is because any criticism has to be patted, right? Like you've got to compliment sandwich the leader as you're saying the things the leader does well or doesn't do well. They did this time and again. There was also a section about, I was going to say social media was such a source of strength, also may have been terrible and undercut him entirely, right? Yeah, it may

Zain 33:31

may have made him look less professional and

Zain 33:33

less like a prime minister, more like an influencer. Pick a fucking lane. Well, that's a great point. Pick a fucking lane. And Carter, I hate to cut you off there, But Carter, I want to get you in on this too. Would the ideal here have been, you're going to sit on a plane and write a reflections document. Would the ideal here have been to say, fuck it, let's have one person mold this with some opinion so that we actually have usable insights rather than a list of nine recommendations that say, do everything more and better?

Carter 34:03

No, it doesn't need to be one person. I think that you're skipping to this end game that says it needs to be constructed you know as one person actually what it needs to be constructed as is a um an honest uh private document that does an evaluation of the campaign leadership um you know and and their strengths so then let

Zain 34:28

let me let me ask you carter do you think there's a private version of this document sitting somewhere that's more blunt that's more let's just use the term insightful that's more instructive for future campaigns this

Zain 34:37

this is the ndp

Carter 34:37

ndp There's no fucking way.

Zain 34:39

way. Yes. Let's just use what we're talking about as the example with the NDP document that's public. I don't think it's just,

Corey 34:44

just, it's not just the NDP. You can't have the public debrief and the private debrief that says something entirely different. That would destroy

Corey 34:50

destroy a party if that got out. And by the way, it would get out.

Corey 34:54

You know, that's the reality. Best case

Carter 34:55

case scenario, there's been a group of people who sat down with the leader and the campaign manager and

Carter 35:00

and said, this is what we need to do next time.

Carter 35:03

And it's a verbal meeting. But I

Carter 35:06

I would argue that there is often not enough done to evaluate the performance of the team that did it before. And I can pick on Rachel Notley for this. Rachel Notley will be entering the next election with basically the same team that ran her failed election in the last election. No

Carter 35:27

No disrespect to Zayn.

Carter 35:30

I mean, a little bit intended, obviously. obviously um but there's you know that that weakness that existed he comes off

Corey 35:38

off a loss and he's just swinging a zane that's fine that's fine this card this is carter this

Zain 35:43

this carter you know some people

Carter 35:44

people came after me i had no choice i had to he says he doesn't

Zain 35:47

doesn't get emotionally invested in the campaigns uh you can see he gets emotional afterwards which is different but it's fine

Zain 35:53

it's cousins of it that's fine i keep going carter you're you're making so you're making Take an example of reflecting

Zain 35:59

reflecting on the campaign. For example, would you want

Zain 36:04

to reflect on your campaign right now? Absolutely. Absolutely. Really? External to you. External

Carter 36:09

to you. It would be great.

Carter 36:11

But it would be more interesting to have you and Corey do it than the people who were involved in the campaign.

Carter 36:19

But then you'd need to sit down with me and debrief, which is probably what we ... This This is the shape of the next podcast then, right? Once I have my document, I will hand it over to you. You will then say, why did you make this decision? What were your options? Why didn't you choose them? To Corey's point, was it the facts? We didn't have enough money. I couldn't make the other choice. The candidate wouldn't do this thing that we were asking her to do. The rest of the team was behaving in this way. you know how would

Zain 36:53

would you actually be open and honest with us on on those would you want to talk about that on the show sure

Carter 36:58

sure why not that's

Carter 37:00

that's actually quite interesting

Carter 37:02

let's let's do it on patreon though so people have to pay for it so

Zain 37:05

so people have to pay good yeah regardless of what platform we put it on i just think

Zain 37:09

that would be a very interesting exercise yeah well

Zain 37:11

i mean because cory and i were not involved in the dynamics of that race we were not involved in in any let's let's be clear any emotional sort of connection neither were you uh in that race Nice.

Zain 37:22

You know, it would be quite fascinating to maybe have the clear-eyed perspective there. But Corey, I wanted to get a little bit more of your insight here on this. So you don't think that a public and private version of this document would exist, which kind of brings the question back to stated objectives, which is, you

Zain 37:39

you know, one could easily conclude that if this is building myth, that these are platitudes as recommendations, that this is an absolutely useless document. Would you agree? Or do you, let's going back to your stated purpose and as an internal management tool, that there's still value to something like that? I

Zain 37:55

I think there's immense value to something like

Corey 37:58

this. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood because it still requires engagement to occur across the board. And if people can see the commentary they had reflected, I mean, this is like engagement 101. So this is something that I've

Corey 38:11

I've done in my my life, right? Run engagements. And there's

Corey 38:14

there's this model from the IAP2, which is the International Association of Public

Corey 38:21

And it effectively says, you've got to align what people's expectations are with the ability of feedback you provide them. You know, is it inform, is it consult all the way through?

Corey 38:29

But the expectation in a political party is that they are going to be involved in this conversation. And the expectation is that the loop will be closed. And so you are sort of living that expectation and meeting their expectation by going through an exercise like this.

Corey 38:46

this happens not just in political parties, this happens in organizations everywhere. Think about any organization that has a

Corey 38:53

community newsletter and also

Corey 38:55

interest in external media. Well,

Corey 38:57

Well, they're almost always going to have situations where there's something in the community newsletter that is not necessarily of significant external media value. And the reason is somebody

Corey 39:08

somebody wants to make sure their work is profiled. Somebody wants to make sure their work has a shot at that external, you know, jam. And is this purpose at this point the stated purpose of getting external news? No. No. I

Corey 39:20

I mean, at this point, it is an internal, you

Corey 39:23

you know, quote unquote, management.

Corey 39:24

And people make those choices and they're not wrong choices. This

Corey 39:29

is the thing I want to underline. This is a conversation I've had in many other contexts in my life.

Zain 39:33

It is a legitimate purpose to say, I want to make sure this person feels

Corey 39:37

It is a legitimate purpose to say, I don't think that all parts of my organization have had like, you know, the spotlight on them recently. just

Corey 39:46

as it's a legitimate purpose to say we want media out of this and

Corey 39:49

where organizations including political parties just need to be clear is they need to know what they're doing

Corey 39:55

right there needs to be an intentionality to it and they need to they

Corey 39:58

need to say as they're constructing something like this maybe not publicly but at least as they're drafting it all right the purpose of this document is x and if x in this case is making sure the party feels that there was listening and And there was thought put into what was said in the four corners of the NDP.

Corey 40:15

And if at the end of the day, when somebody got this, they would feel that then mission accomplished. Now, if the goal was to make sure they felt heard and they read this and they say, you guys didn't listen at all, mission

Corey 40:25

And so it's just making sure you bring that intentionality to the document as you're going.

Corey 40:31

The other thing I'll say though, Zane, is, well,

Corey 40:33

well, the document might not be helpful as a debrief.

Corey 40:37

The conversations probably were.

Corey 40:39

As people were going around and hearing what people thought worked well and didn't work well, the stuff that didn't make it into the report, the stuff that you could sit and have a conversation with the other people on the drafting committee and just weigh the pros and cons of it, that

Corey 40:52

that was probably helpful for the people who were engaged in it. And if it was downloaded the way Stephen discussed, like talking to the leader privately or a small group around the leader after, in

Corey 41:02

in a way that debrief happened, it just did not happen through a print document.

Zain 41:06

Carter, I hate to use the term effective because sometimes these are, the goal here is not to necessarily be effective. It's perhaps to be as wide casting as possible or to have redundant conversations so as to know how many people believe something. But if I were having you

Zain 41:22

to use, borrow Corey's term, with the stated objective to have a true, authentic debrief to run a better campaign next time, okay? Let's use that and underline that. This is for better Better outcomes next time.

Zain 41:34

What would your debrief processes have been? And some of the things you could choose from is how the process would have been occurred, who you would have talked to. Corey threw in voters earlier on when we started. Would you make this public or would you leave it private? Would you have the leader as part of it? Would you use external? Talk to me about some of the points you would like to stitch together if the stated objective here

Zain 41:58

was to actually run a better campaign next election.

Carter 42:02

Well, Corey is, I should thank Corey. He really

Carter 42:06

really crystallized why I hate the engagement process.

Carter 42:14

We were at H&K. There was an engagement piece and there was a campaigns piece. And we, of course, were involved in campaigns because we believe that changing people's minds and creating better outcomes was more important and talking to people in the masturbatory kind of methodology that Corey has just outlined. And that's all there is. You just called it masturbatory?

Zain 42:32

masturbatory? Is that what you

Carter 42:33

you just said? Masturbatory. I studied theater in university and we did masturbatory theater.

Corey 42:39

After you left Hill and Dalton, by the way, you may not remember. You're going to tell them, oh, my God, you should tell them. They were merged and I was national director of the merged thing. Yeah.

Corey 42:46

Yeah. Of engagement strategies,

Carter 42:48

Carter, which was a strategy of masturbation, according to you.

Carter 42:53

But here's the thing.

Carter 42:55

Here's the thing. I think that it's way more important to talk to people who know what the hell they're talking about than to talk to less engaged, less informed people. And I think that the problem of engagement, and this is the problem on virtually every campaign, you go down from the top level professionals all the way down to the volunteers. And there are some excellent volunteers. There are some fantastic volunteers.

Carter 43:16

But more often than not, we should have them door knocking or manning the phones. A lot of volunteers don't understand the the principles of politics, the way that we'd want them to understand the principles of politics. And as a result, going back and just simply going and talking to each of them, you know, every time I do a campaign debrief, or every time I talk to campaigners, the first thing they say is, we should really engage the youth vote. This is the campaign where we should engage the youth vote. You know how useless that is to engage the youth vote? The youth vote hasn't ever been engaged. You can go back to the silent generation. When they were young, they weren't voting either. This idea that we're going to somehow change human nature and make people care about something that they simply don't care about is the problem when you're talking to the less engaged audience.

Carter 44:10

I think that Corey's right. I think that you need to talk to an informed group of people.

Carter 44:16

We need to talk about voters. We need to talk to the the organizers. We need to talk to the key players. And yes, that will mean that we talk to the riding association presidents because they are informed voters who are raising the money and therefore are vital stakeholders. But you got to

Carter 44:35

to be really careful with engagement because you have to draw a line where you don't want to go below it.

Zain 44:40

I'm going to come to you in a second, Corey, but Carter, let me clarify a few things from you. So if you were to design your own process, would you include voters? Yes or no?

Carter 44:47

Yeah. Well, I'd pull voters immediately. immediately afterwards. You'd poll them.

Zain 44:51

You'd poll voters immediately. Would you

Carter 44:53

you make your debrief? Poll and focus group maybe. Poll and focus group. People who didn't vote NDP this time that voted NDP before. People who did vote NDP for the first time. And

Carter 45:02

And maybe lifelong NDP voters. A couple of focus groups in a couple of different areas.

Zain 45:07

You'd have some specific lanes or qualifiers. Okay. And one final question. Private or public, Carter? Would this be posted somewhere or would this be internal consumption only? I

Carter 45:16

I have no interest in giving this to the the public.

Zain 45:20

to you, you talked about voters. I want to talk about the same sort of guardrails I gave Carter. What would your ideal engagement look like or ideal debrief look like if the goal is stated as to run a better campaign next time? Talk to me about voters, how you'd include them. Carter's talking about focus groups and polling. Talk to me about private or public or any other sort of rubric or framework you'd want to use if you had control over a process.

Corey 45:44

Yeah. Well, so for me, the most obvious and the most critical is voters. The idea that you're going to talk to people about, you know, within the party about how policies landed is absurd. Talk about like the machinery, talk about the feedback, talk about the mechanisms through which the party runs its work. But at the end of the day, you are not like the average voter. You are not a swing voter. You're a hard-carrying member of a political party who's running a campaign or running a riding association. You are so different from what is actually the reality on the ground for most voters that your advice is not just useless, it's counterproductive. because

Zain 46:23

because if you follow

Corey 46:23

follow some of the advice that's in there i i god help you like i i you know there was this one article about how one of the challenges one of the reasons why they thought that jagmeet singh didn't do as well as he should have was they didn't have enough independent voices verifying ndp policy commitments that's

Corey 46:40

that's fucking insane that's so insane i don't even know where to begin because most voters will stay up here what's the commitment some voters will say They give me the commitment long form, almost no voters, unless they're university professors who are, or like just the absolute diehards are going to say, okay, let me see the footnotes. Let's citation this. Let's make sure there's there. And like, look, yeah, there's absolutely communications value and validators. You want other people

Zain 47:04

people telling your story,

Corey 47:05

story, but the notion that the problem is simply that, um,

Corey 47:10

you know, voters needed to hear that these ideas were validated is wrong.

Corey 47:14

wrong. It's just wrong. wrong yeah but you if you started to take that advice you would you would end up with

Corey 47:21

incredibly dense policy commitments that do have footnotes which i guess is kind of what the ndp ends up doing all the time so i

Corey 47:28

we've solved part of their problem let

Carter 47:29

let them live their life cory let them live their life the

Corey 47:33

the voter part is the most important for this particular part of the exercise though i

Corey 47:37

i would do focus groups i would do the accessible voters who didn't like

Corey 47:41

okay we thought you were open to us you even state that you're open to us but you didn't why Why not?

Corey 47:45

That'd be the most important. You look at those next concentric circles, the ones who have characteristics similar to accessible voters, but have to sort of state that they're not. Well, OK, why not? And

Corey 47:54

And maybe probably not go any further than that, because I don't really care about the people who are outside of that. And I don't really care about the people who are always with me.

Corey 48:02

It is always about the accessible voter universe.

Corey 48:06

from there, after those focus groups, I would try to get some conclusions that I could then poll on. So I'm getting a small group to sort of lead

Corey 48:14

lead me into the construction of questions that I would then get a broader audience to validate. And

Corey 48:19

that's the general approach I would take in trying to get voter feedback and voter opinions here, which are the most crucial in

Corey 48:26

in a game that is all about, do

Corey 48:28

do the voters support you? And that

Corey 48:30

is missing tells us this is not a sincere debrief exercise. exercise carter

Zain 48:35

carter last sort of round of questioning on this that i wanted to start with you on which is if

Zain 48:40

if you were in the ndp let's say you were the ndp campaign strategist you're hired today all

Zain 48:45

all right yesterday i'll

Zain 48:47

i'll get fired tomorrow well they just saw

Zain 48:49

yesterday so you know they're like we see something here um

Corey 48:53

they give you these 20

Zain 48:56

broadest question how are you molding this in terms of the next campaign because there is an an element to what Corey says around some people needing to be heard. There's, of course, the other side of it. To your point, the effectiveness and the raw, who gives a shit, let's just win.

Zain 49:11

How are you taking something like this and implementing it? That's what I find really fascinating. And the answer could be as simple as, I'm not. But how would you look at what you see here around the nine recommendations that they have as their principal outline of, here's what we need to do. Adopt a regional model, maintain a permanent campaign, maintain year-round you know data program be bold and communicating diversity of thought it's just expand the

Zain 49:36

the leader's tour i mean how how are

Carter 49:38

are they not doing this already but

Zain 49:39

but so what what do you how are you kind of taking this if you were leading this campaign well how what are you doing with something like this i'm trying to give insight to folks that are listening saying okay this is a document what does a party do with the document as such everybody

Carter 49:51

everybody sometimes needs to prop up their bookshelf so that it doesn't fall over forward and sometimes what you do is you put a document underneath the front of it so it kind of leans back a little bit that's what i would do with this with this piece because this piece this piece offers nothing about trade-offs right and i hate to do this but it doesn't say do

Zain 50:10

less to anything it

Carter 50:11

it doesn't say do

Zain 50:11

do this less so you could do this more cory

Carter 50:13

cory makes a great point like okay

Carter 50:17

okay we're gonna do more leaders tour you know how much you know how expensive leader store is it's one of it is the largest besides you know advertising advertising it's the largest expenditure on the docket it's super problem steven we'll

Corey 50:28

we'll just do more fundraising to pay for more leaders because

Carter 50:31

because we weren't maximizing our fundraising because because we're idiots apparently um well we'll just know there's so much more right there and we just chose not to do it because you know why would we um the

Carter 50:43

the trade-off is everything and and because this document doesn't have trade-offs it makes it uh essentially useless and you

Carter 50:52

you know That's where you really need to get to. Now, I'm sure that someone has these trade-offs and I would probably sit down with the people who created this document and

Carter 51:01

I would probably ask them, okay, so

Carter 51:04

so what were the trade-offs that forced these decisions in the first place?

Carter 51:10

did we think that having Jagmeet Singh, I mean, I think that we talked about his social media presence on the pod

Carter 51:16

pod a number of times and I think that we reached the conclusion that maybe this wasn't helping him in terms of his appearing to be like a serious leader.

Carter 51:26

But why did we choose to go that way? Were we trying to save some money? Were we trying to reach a youth audience, which is pointless? What was the decision tree that put us in that space? And how would we rework that decision tree now that we've got better information?

Zain 51:46

Corey, if you were molding this into something usable, tangible for the next campaign, what would you do with it?

Corey 51:54

Well, the one advantage it has, if

Corey 51:57

if you are, say,

Corey 51:58

say, just hired by the NDP to then create the strategy for the next campaign, including some of the allocation decisions that Stephen articulated. And I mean, I agree. Like, this is just a list everything, you know, no no consideration of kind of drawbacks and consequences there it's kind of this actually it's very similar to kind of that classic conservative critique that government just needs to be more efficient just be more efficient yeah

Corey 52:22

you know all you need is more efficiency you get the right efficiency in there and you can do all of the things right

Corey 52:28

but there are limits to that kind of thinking and political parties hit them very very quickly but

Corey 52:33

but if you are given a document like this and say you're

Zain 52:36

you're the new campaign

Corey 52:37

campaign director of the ndp the one thing it does have going for it is

Corey 52:41

is it does literally say everything so

Corey 52:44

it's not going to necessarily dictate your activities but you can do license eight

Corey 52:48

eight things you want to do in here and

Corey 52:50

and just do them and say they came out of the recommendations right

Corey 52:54

why are you doing this well they were in the recommendations why aren't you doing the other things well we're getting to them but we're doing these ones first from the recommendations

Corey 53:01

so it it does give you a certain license to make some system changes. They had some conversations about centralizing EDA activities. I actually think in this entire document, that was probably the one thing that probably had value because they snuck it into a 20-page report and they basically were hinting at centralizing further local constituency association functions, which

Corey 53:23

which was central campaign has interest in a lot of the time.

Corey 53:27

But yeah, so you point to that and say, well, that was a recommendation. Why am I taking Taking away your local autonomy, that was a recommendation out of the debrief, man. Right, right, right. I'm new here. My hands

Corey 53:36

hands are tied. You guys are the ones who wrote the debrief. And so that's the value, I think.

Zain 53:41

I like that. Nicely done. We're going to leave that segment there. Moving on to our final segment, our over, under, and our lightning round. Stephen Carter, if the world revolves around you, it's because of this show, Stephen Carter, overrated or underrated campaign

Carter 53:56

I think they're underrated when they're done properly. I think that understanding

Carter 54:00

understanding what you did right and what you did wrong is the core function of professionalism. And you don't grow without understanding those pieces. I think that the central critique that both Corey and I have made about this particular piece is that this

Carter 54:15

this doesn't necessarily achieve that end.

Zain 54:20

Corey, campaign debriefs, overrated, underrated?

Corey 54:24

Underrated. They don't have to take the form of a public document like this. It can take a form of a series of conversations. Obviously, there's limits to how much you're going to remember.

Corey 54:32

But I also think they're probably a little bit underrated in even the internal management sense. And if they're done well and if they're done considering

Corey 54:39

considering themselves as internal management documents, they allow you to mend some fences after election too. Bring some people out of the woodwork and bring them back into the tent.

Corey 54:50

And ultimately, the biggest problem they have is that the

Corey 54:53

the people who write them sometimes seem to be confused as to what they're writing. Is it internal management or is it a truth

Zain 55:01

Corey, I'm going to start this next question with you. In fact, this next question could necessitate its own deep dive podcast, probably authored by Carter to start with. But I'm going to start it. Corey, overrated

Zain 55:11

overrated or underrated municipal political parties. So we had Carter working for one. We had Ken Sim, who is the new mayor of Vancouver, which we haven't talked about, by the way, defeating an incumbent in Kennedy Stewart. His party, the ABC party. party, Carter, I'll get to you in a second here, if I'm not mistaken, brand new party, sweeps the entire Vancouver election, including the mayor's chair, Corey, political parties in municipal politics, overrated

Corey 55:41

Underrated. We live in Alberta, where

Corey 55:45

where there are not really political parties in Calgary

Corey 55:47

Calgary or Edmonton, two pretty

Corey 55:49

pretty big cities. When you think about Vancouver, like Vancouver proper is much It's much smaller than Calgary property. It is. It's not

Corey 55:56

not that kind of metro area.

Corey 55:59

And we don't have political parties. And in some ways that baffles me because we ultimately have councils which sort of beg for parliamentary government, right? The idea

Zain 56:08

idea that you say

Corey 56:09

say – because the mayor is just one council vote. But

Corey 56:11

But if you could get a block that would represent the majority of council and that block held together like a political party did, you

Corey 56:19

you could really change things more dramatically than occur right now. And when I look at other cities where there are stronger party models, and there's varying degrees of,

Corey 56:28

of, you know, the party whip and all of them, I

Corey 56:31

I see our future. I see this as an inevitability because you can share resources, you can share volunteers, and

Corey 56:39

by sharing a cause, you can just get a lot more done.

Zain 56:42

Carter, you've got some lived experience in this. You've now seen behind a political party on a municipal level. You've also seen the power of perhaps a political party with the Ken Sim example, sweeping an entire slate. But having this experience, and then also academically and strategically, Carter, municipal

Zain 56:58

municipal political parties, overrated or underrated in your mind?

Carter 57:01

Underrated. When we can look at all kinds of different examples. Ken Bozenkul and I actually wrote an article because, as you know, he's the full package. package. And when

Carter 57:11

when we created the article,

Carter 57:13

article, it was designed to be like, how can these two people agree on anything? And the reason we agreed on it is because- As in you two,

Zain 57:20

just to be clear, the

Zain 57:21

the two of you. Yeah. That

Corey 57:22

around 2015 or so. Yeah.

Carter 57:24

Yeah. Well, it was earlier than that. It was after the second century election, I think. But the reasoning

Carter 57:29

reasoning and the rationale is, look at what's happened with Gondek.

Carter 57:32

Gondek was the top of the ticket, right? The mayor's office, the mayor's race is what everybody's voting on. And people are really choosing their councillor candidates kind of on secondary information.

Carter 57:42

And then the mayor gets elected, and the mayor does not necessarily have a council that wishes to go with her or with him. Then she ran into the exact same problem on issues like secondary suites, which have 70th percentile style of approvals. So having a political party enables the council and the mayor to reflect the actual desires of the electorate. where you know and on top of that it enables you to get rid of the power of the slate enables you to get rid of some of the weaker performers uh and i can think of a few uh right off the top of my head like sean chu um you know that shouldn't have been even enabled to run um

Carter 58:22

um and wasn't enabled to run in in other you know uh party type situations when he put his name So this

Carter 58:31

this is a, you

Carter 58:34

the party gives you more credibility, it gives you better candidates, and it gives you a better proposal for the actual voters. And I just can't believe that we tried to start something like it with Jyoti. We made the pitch to Nenshi

Carter 58:55

Nenshi that he should have done it. Nenshi's famous words to me were, I can work with anybody. And that year he had Sean Chu elected. Well, good

Carter 59:05

good luck working with Sean. You know, like it's like working with a stick, not even a sharp stick.

Corey 59:14

I mean, if anyone deserves criticism, but Jesus. What

Carter 59:17

What did I say that was incorrect?

Carter 59:19

Nothing. You know, okay.

Zain 59:21

This is why I think this necessitates a deep dive because wasn't it a couple episodes ago that we talked about the trials and tribulations and opportunity for upstarting a political party, right? If I'm not mistaken.

Zain 59:31

What's interesting about this on the municipal side, Carter, this ABC party out of nowhere. It's almost like these parties have been started out of thin air because they're maybe not exactly political parties. They're just kind of brand templates. plates. Talk to me about your experience with kind of Surrey Forward. Is that a new brand there in a sense and how it was slapped together? I shouldn't say slapped together. That sounds so disparaging and it's not meant to be, but it's almost a compliment in the sense that they're upstarts in many ways that can kind of become incumbents very quickly as we're seeing in Vancouver.

Carter 1:00:01

Civic brands are so much more fluid. And then from those civic brands can come provincial brands and other other political power so we had vision vancouver you know gregor robertson was the uh the mayor of vancouver for years under the vision template there is no vision vancouver anymore npa

Carter 1:00:19

npa like a year years ago the non-partisan um i

Carter 1:00:23

can't remember what the alliance alliance alliance they were they were the the the power in in vancouver politics and now abc kind of comes out of that out of the npa dysfunction because it didn't just appear it appeared because of a weakness in the market right when the market doesn't like the choices that are available the market shifts to new choices and the the political marketplace is shifting away from like even surrey connect the one that won here in surrey was a new brand this time right safe surrey Coalition was a new brand the time before that. One of the hypotheses we have about the guy who came third was he was running on the old Surrey First brand, which was three and four elections ago. It had its own strength. So these brands do shape and shift according to what voter expectations are and ironically both both uh you know the jenny sims with surrey forward and um

Carter 1:01:25

kennedy stewart both ran with forward branding so

Carter 1:01:29

so kennedy stewart was forward with kennedy stewart or something like that it was kind of stupid um

Carter 1:01:34

and ours was surrey forward but you know like it didn't offer any particular brand position well neither does surrey connect and and neither does ABC. But I just

Carter 1:01:44

just think it's fascinating. I love the idea of local brands, and I would be up for making a local slate or party in Calgary and or Edmonton for the next municipal election for

Carter 1:01:57

for sure. That's what needs to happen.

Zain 1:02:00

Corey, a final question. I'm going to start with you. Overrated or underrated, the

Zain 1:02:07

i shouldn't even call it opposition research the posts that we are now seeing revealed from danielle smith's um subscription only social media service i believe locals.com where she's done live streams she's done posts um and has many comments on uh the unvaccinated on the 2020 U.S. elections, on residential schools, on Ukraine and Russia, some of them parroting or bordering conspiracy theory, others being perhaps quite alarming, overrated or underrated this, I shouldn't call it treasure trove, but this database of material that really illustrates Daniel Smith's views. What do you kind of think in terms of its political usefulness and efficacy, overrated or underrated?

Corey 1:02:57

I think it's underrated, but if people aren't careful on the NDP side, it could very quickly become overrated. So there's a line that needs to be worked here, but let's start here.

Corey 1:03:06

So we were on the Ryan Jesperson show on Friday and

Corey 1:03:11

brought up this local stuff and he's like, see what she's posting here about like World War II and comparing it to Nazis, you know, like the idea of being vaccinated. That's, this is Ryan, I'm paraphrasing here. That's pretty crazy. I can't believe this isn't more of a conversation. Well,

Corey 1:03:25

fast forward six hours and it was like all of a sudden, you know, Justin

Corey 1:03:30

Justin Ling has written this article about how he subscribed to it and he saw all of these things. And he brought forward a couple, including one where Daniel Smith was, you

Corey 1:03:41

you know, seemed pretty receptive to the idea that Russia should be allowed to invade part of Ukraine or like this was a more complicated issue. you many lines that you would hear from people on the pro-russia side you gotta you gotta give a kind of a little bit of latitude in in kind of the early days the fog of war the number of people i heard make all sorts of claims because we were just tuning into this thing for the first time and we were all sort of grounding ourselves and what's

Carter 1:04:04

what's going on but

Corey 1:04:06

but i want to make a broader point here which is that danielle smith presents a unique opportunity uh

Corey 1:04:12

uh for her opponents in

Corey 1:04:13

in that She is on record

Corey 1:04:17

record for decades taking positions that were kind of outside of the mainstream in the 90s and have fallen so far out of the mainstream that

Corey 1:04:28

that I think it causes serious alarm for some of the people in her orbit here. And I think her caucus is going to be a little bit concerned with how she's going to manage these things as they come forward. And some of them are big. Some of them are small. I saw one. I can't remember who shared it on Twitter. I think it was like an education group or an educator where

Corey 1:04:45

where Danielle Smith in the 90s was opining, students

Corey 1:04:48

students don't need computers. Almost like, what do these computers have to do with education, right? As a headline. Well, that's pretty funny. It reminds me of sort of like the Newsweek, like the internet's never going to replace a library. The internet's never going to replace an encyclopedia. The internet's never going to replace you name it. It was just like a list of things the internet has 100 replaced she

Corey 1:05:10

has so much in her background that people are going to be able to assemble all sorts of attacks because the other thing and we've talked about on this show even

Corey 1:05:19

even using ourselves as an example when

Corey 1:05:21

when you're a pundit sometimes you just say shit and

Corey 1:05:25

and carter and i have been guilty of this where of course we've talked about this off the air but like we

Corey 1:05:30

we don't feel that strongly about it one way or the other but steven says one thing so i'll say the opposite right or he'll do the exact same to me um because you know it's not even just about the show it's kind of fun it's kind of fun to argue with your friends right

Corey 1:05:44

take a piss out of them and

Corey 1:05:45

and when you've got that deadline and you must publish all of the time you're going to publish some garbage and you're going to publish some stuff that does not age

Corey 1:05:53

age very well and

Corey 1:05:55

and uh and so now if you're the ndp in alberta your challenge is you've

Corey 1:06:00

you've got to put this all into a coherent adherent attack that doesn't just seem like you're throwing everything at

Zain 1:06:06

carter overrated underrated the

Zain 1:06:08

the discovery of daniel smith on the subscription only social media the the material they're overrated underrated for political use underrated

Carter 1:06:16

underrated i agree with everything cory said but i'm gonna add one other thing where the hell were the opposite were the six other candidates that ran against daniel smith in a leadership that just concluded how

Carter 1:06:26

how on earth did

Carter 1:06:30

did travis staves not bring up or did not find this this locals thing like was he completely out of like did they not even look at what danielle smith had done she she didn't she faced virtually no opposition can i say steven you jump in i've

Corey 1:06:46

i've got a thesis yeah i'm not gonna throw out like i gotta say i

Corey 1:06:49

i was just talking about like this unique experience she provides with decades of of comments that are a little bit outside of the mainstream these were really recent really

Corey 1:06:57

these were in the last couple of years and

Corey 1:07:00

fact that her uh her opponents in the ucp either a didn't find it or b didn't feel they could use it tells

Corey 1:07:08

tells us a lot about either her opponents or the ucp or both yeah

Corey 1:07:13

yeah right i mean it was it was it's pretty unreal

Corey 1:07:16

unreal to me that nobody found these ukraine posts given their relatively public nature so

Zain 1:07:25

could be a whole episode as well well can

Zain 1:07:26

can we spend a couple minutes on this and

Zain 1:07:28

and i just want to focus very quickly for the for the

Zain 1:07:31

the yeah it's right what

Zain 1:07:34

if it was column b carter what if it was column b they knew about it and they couldn't use it that that is my hypothesis i have no inside information but

Zain 1:07:44

but the fact that this was largely public that she mentioned you know for a while she's like i'm leaving twitter i'm leaving my talk show i'm going to locals.com i think we all knew about this um

Zain 1:07:53

it wasn't like a mystery that she had this 12,000 person subscription service.

Zain 1:07:59

What is the analysis you come to should, this is hypothetical on top of a hypothetical, should this have been something that they knew about, but just didn't use? What do you think that says about her and the party?

Carter 1:08:11

It can't be. It can't be. I mean- You don't

Zain 1:08:13

don't think that's possible, eh? I

Zain 1:08:14

mean- You're refusing to believe it or you're saying, walk me through why it can't be actually. Let Let me ask you that. Because

Carter 1:08:20

Because it's too stupid. I mean, they're stupid to begin with. I mean, we have, it just can't be. They just can't be that dumb. They went after her for other things. How do you not go after them for the Ukraine war when you are from northern Alberta where there's such a huge

Carter 1:08:40

huge population of Ukrainian Canadians that still feel their homeland in it?

Carter 1:08:49

visceral way how how on earth do you not use that i just don't understand i don't understand that that's just impossible for me to believe are

Zain 1:08:58

are you with carter cory that it's impossible that they held it back if they had it i

Corey 1:09:04

for i think some of the same reason i listen i i'm going to take a little bit different tack on it i i think if they knew about it he's right and what our listeners outside of alberta need to understand is that alberta

Corey 1:09:16

alberta basically has the largest population of ukrainians outside of ukraine you know i mean

Zain 1:09:21

mean it's very significant yeah

Corey 1:09:23

yeah in manitoba has a higher percent but alberta has like higher numbers i think ontario might kind of you know it's just right there with ontario because there's like more

Corey 1:09:31

more people in ontario but huge ukrainian population in um

Corey 1:09:35

um in alberta in canada in general in alberta um you think about our deputy prime minister from northern alberta ukrainian

Corey 1:09:43

ukrainian descent that's that's not like a wacky coincidence there we had a premier year, Ed Stelmack, who did not speak English until he went to school. He was born in Alberta, but he spoke Ukrainian. I

Carter 1:09:53

I may have found that out the hard way one time.

Corey 1:09:55

time. Yeah, you did, buddy. That's a story for another day too.

Corey 1:10:01

So even if you are thinking, okay, so I guess I would say like, as much as you might be looking at threads of conservatism globally and thinking like, well, maybe this is something that there's an appetite for. Yeah.

Zain 1:10:10

Yeah. And this would be effective, so

Zain 1:10:12

so to speak. Yeah. In

Corey 1:10:12

In Alberta, that math is different yeah

Corey 1:10:16

even if you did have some sort of squeamishness about bringing it forward you didn't want to look like the person attacking daniel smith then

Corey 1:10:22

then why not drop it to the media why

Corey 1:10:26

any other fashion to get it out there and having people looking at it so i actually think in in some wild way i

Corey 1:10:34

i can't you know the opponents kind of dropped the ball they didn't find this stuff or when they read it they just sort of their radar didn't go off the the way it should have gone off and

Corey 1:10:42

and maybe we shouldn't give alberta's media a pass either like like you said zane we all knew that she was on locals hell we shouldn't give ourselves ourselves ourselves included

Corey 1:10:50

we knew she was on there and uh you know nobody nobody seemed to read it or reach or register it at the very least in

Carter 1:10:56

in fairness we don't like listening to other people's shit so that's true you know that's probably why we don't let anyone

Zain 1:11:02

influence anything here we're gonna leave it there that's a wrap on episode 1008 of the strategist my name My name is Zane Veldry with me as always, Stephen Carter, Corey Hogan, and we will see you next time.

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