Juno News - April 21, 2024


Alberta takes a stand against Guilbeault’s war on cars

Topics
roads and transportation in Alberta
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Devin Drieschen Steven Guilbeault Andrew Lawton
Smith responds to guilty verdict for Coutts 3 Former finance minister slams Liberals’ fiscal record

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

220.77

Word count

1,336

Sentence count

—

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of The Andrew Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton sits down with Alberta's Transport Minister, Devon Dreeshan, to discuss the challenges facing the province's rural areas, the lack of infrastructure in rural Alberta, and the need for new roads.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 i'm at the canada strong and free network conference the country's conservative movement
00:00:13.280 gathered in one place we've heard from all sorts of speakers and all sorts of interview guests
00:00:17.800 on a range of subjects but you can't talk about the conservative movement in this country
00:00:22.080 without talking about the conservative heartland of alberta it's a province i love i end up there
00:00:26.620 all the time so much so that when i'm there people assume i live there which is i think a great
00:00:30.740 compliment because i do love the people there but i did get the chance to do a fireside chat with
00:00:36.220 premier danielle smith and i have the great privilege of now sitting down with alberta's
00:00:40.960 transport minister devon dreeshan minister good to talk to you thanks for joining me today thanks
00:00:45.560 for having me on your show really appreciate it so obviously there's been a fair bit of strain on
00:00:50.260 alberta's relationship with ottawa over the the last say the last couple of years but but we've seen
00:00:54.900 even some flashpoints on this in the last couple of months uh what is it you've brought here to
00:00:59.360 uh ottawa what's the message you're trying to send what is it you were trying to get out of this trip
00:01:02.600 so roads roads roads uh we have minister guibo that has gone out in the media saying that the federal
00:01:07.560 government isn't going to be funding new roads he clarified those comments by saying well not just
00:01:12.640 any big new roads um and that's actually caused a lot of concern not just in alberta but in other
00:01:17.660 provinces and even within first nations across this country because obviously it's the responsibility of the
00:01:22.820 federal government to be building roads and maintaining roads on first nations and we actually
00:01:27.400 had a delegation of the ochi's first nation as well as clearwater county the county that surrounds
00:01:32.240 the first nation to advocate for a road project that we have provincial dollars municipal dollars we
00:01:38.420 just need federal dollars but for years we've been getting blocked and those types of comments from
00:01:42.760 minister guibo saying the federal government has no interest in building roads really uh has has a lot
00:01:47.360 of people really concerned about that that direction by the federal government yeah and despite the the
00:01:52.780 pseudo backtrack on that i i think it does show a pretty big sense of misunderstanding how life is in
00:01:59.160 alberta i mean certainly in in cities like calgary and edmonton you have mass transit systems people
00:02:04.000 are able to use those but uh not year-round in some cases and then you also look at rural alberta where
00:02:09.640 you can't just say well we don't need the road and and that just seems to be an utter mismatch here and
00:02:14.520 is it a gaffe or is it accidental honesty i think it's just it's a lack of understanding of how rural
00:02:20.800 alberta truly is uh this specific road and so many in in alberta it's there's one way in and out for
00:02:27.000 for people that live in that community and uh obviously they had a bad forest fire last year so
00:02:32.280 even on safety egress it's not just a a smooth way to get to town or get to the hospital or doctor
00:02:36.880 or uh or get to school but it's it's a life or death situation of being able to in the case of a
00:02:42.920 wildfire to have evacuation it's a gravel road that needs to be paved so the dust that kicks up
00:02:47.760 and the unsafety or the the lack of safety on this road because it hasn't been uh hasn't been
00:02:53.660 repaved is is a huge issue for that area and i think people just don't understand because in in
00:02:57.820 towns and cities there's lots of ways to get around but when there's one way in and out i just think
00:03:02.260 the federal government doesn't understand that in rural alberta i know there's obviously been a fair
00:03:05.820 bit of difficulty with your government and stephen gilbo in particular for for a range of issues
00:03:11.200 have you found with your federal counterparting on the transport file that there's at least been a
00:03:15.780 a fairly constructive relationship or has it really been like pulling teeth to get anything
00:03:20.180 any cooperation from the feds well well i've said this at federal provincial territorial meetings
00:03:24.800 before if alberta was a hockey team when it came to transportation and our power play was the the 0.99
00:03:29.380 national trade corridor fund which has been a huge huge you know advantage to have within the country
00:03:35.380 alberta's zero for nine so if that was our power play that'd be a pretty bad power play and i think
00:03:40.100 people would ask lots of questions about what's going on so that's something that we're going to
00:03:43.900 continue to advocate for i've met with minister rodriguez to really push the renewal of that
00:03:48.380 national trade corridor fund because it's been fully allocated though even though there's a couple
00:03:52.720 years left on it uh so we want to make sure that alberta we at least get our money back when it comes to 0.71
00:03:57.720 the transfers that we give to the federal government when you talk about national trade i mean it's
00:04:01.880 important to know that there are still barriers that exist on interprovincial trade which people don't
00:04:06.060 really realize are front and center and i i was wondering if you had anything on that that you'd
00:04:09.940 like to see some movement on so we actually before our election in alberta we signed a an agreement with
00:04:15.880 saskatchewan manitoba we call it our prairie mou to work on harmonizing our capital plans on on road
00:04:21.460 projects that come to the the border uh as well as look at regular regulation that we can try to
00:04:27.820 eliminate the borders across our provinces to make sure that it's easy for big nation building
00:04:32.140 projects to finally be built again to kind of de-risk politically the approval process so that
00:04:37.360 actually spawned on work with bc the three prairie provinces and the three territories to work
00:04:41.800 together on a similar type of agreement uh we'd love to see the federal government at at those talks
00:04:46.720 because obviously national trade and interprovincial trade is a federal jurisdiction but uh we're not
00:04:51.860 waiting for the federal government to do that in alberta we're taking the lead and uh we'll we'll see
00:04:55.660 what happens on on a lot of these negotiations we're having with other provinces well it's funny you
00:04:59.800 mention that i mean there have been a lot of issues where we we've seen especially between
00:05:03.340 alberta saskatchewan a lot of cooperation on areas where the federal government is either not present
00:05:08.240 or is working against what you guys want and uh certainly on some issues like the carbon tax you
00:05:13.320 have provincial government saying hey we want a meeting and the federal government not wanting to
00:05:16.760 grant that are you able to do what you're trying to do without the federal government do you have an
00:05:21.940 option to really do an end run around the feds are you really at their mercy on some of this
00:05:25.400 well obviously the constitution we we have a lot of latitude to to do what what we need to do to
00:05:30.460 to promote alberta and to protect and make sure that our economy is is strong but there's always it's
00:05:36.320 always great to have strength in the numbers um whether it's saskatchewan manitoba bc quebec
00:05:41.720 ontario the maritime provinces to be able to to join forces to say you know the federal government
00:05:46.660 has a role to be able to partner with provinces on certain issues but the federal government should
00:05:51.320 stay in their lane at the end of the day minister thank you awesome thank you so much appreciate it
00:05:55.220 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at
00:06:00.060 www.tnc.news