Juno News - August 27, 2025


Danielle Smith calls out Equalization


Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

149.85683

Word count

628

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this clip, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is asked about how much Ottawa is taking from Alberta and why we need to do more to fight back. The answer is simple: Ottawa is transferring billions of dollars out of Alberta every year to be spent in other parts of Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.560 I'm Kris Sims. I'm the Alberta Director for the Canadian Taxpayers Federation here on Juneau News.
00:00:05.920 I had to show you this clip, okay? We can't let this one slip by. This is Alberta Premier
00:00:12.720 Danielle Smith just bringing the fire, okay? To her credit, she is sitting on these panels. They're
00:00:19.200 called Alberta Next panels. They're traveling all over the province and she's sitting there
00:00:24.320 for hours and people are coming in asking her questions. In some cases, they're horrifically
00:00:29.200 rude questions. In this case, she was actually asked about how Ottawa is treating Alberta and how
00:00:36.560 much we are getting screwed by equalization. I can't say it better than this. Listen to the Premier.
00:00:43.360 Talking about tonight, is Ottawa over, do you want to hear the answer? Ottawa overtaxing us.
00:00:50.000 I mentioned that at the beginning of the evening, that they, we are, our, our program costs are 70%
00:00:56.880 of all tax dollars. We only collect 40%. Ottawa collects 60% and then they use political means
00:01:03.440 to transfer it. Alberta, year after year, has 20 to 25 billion dollars that is siphoned out of our system
00:01:11.360 to go to Ottawa so that it can be spent mostly in Quebec, but also in other places that vote liberal.
00:01:17.200 We have been watching this for years. 600 billion dollars in the last 40 or 50 years that have been
00:01:24.080 taken out of this province. You don't think we might be able to do a little bit more on social
00:01:28.000 spending if those 20 to 25 billion dollars stayed here? You don't think we'd be able to cut taxes a
00:01:32.880 bit if those 20 to 25 billion dollars stayed here? It is 5,000 dollars per Albertan that every single
00:01:42.640 year gets transferred out of this province for political reasons so that the Liberals can continue
00:01:48.720 to spend it in places that vote Liberal. That is the, that is what is happening in the province and
00:01:53.920 in the country. Thank you. That is once again Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. She was at the Fort
00:02:00.160 Mac Alberta next panel there and you could hear people in the crowd cheering her on and she's right.
00:02:06.000 It's not just, it's not just equalization, it's other transfer payments. To put it nicely, Alberta is
00:02:12.400 getting drained and most of that money goes to Ottawa which is then redistributed across Canada.
00:02:20.240 I'll put it this way, even without equalization, okay, I did the math on this and it's shocking.
00:02:26.560 So you might have heard the estimation that since 2015 there's been so many pipelines blocked and
00:02:34.560 resources projects strangled, so many no, no, no stop signs coming from the previous Trudeau government
00:02:41.520 that it's cost Canada around 600 billion dollars, okay? On top of that, the parliamentary budget officer
00:02:50.160 has pointed out that Ottawa's cap on Alberta's oil and gas, the cap on Alberta's energy production,
00:02:59.120 because it is a production cap by all means, if you combine those two costs, that would cover the
00:03:06.880 entire populations of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba's income taxes for 10 years.
00:03:18.640 So the Premier is spot on by taking it to Ottawa, pointing out that Alberta needs more respect,
00:03:26.400 that we need to get our resources to market, and we have to stop getting screwed by the East, 0.85
00:03:32.560 because they're taking way more from our province than we are ever seeing coming back. And for folks
00:03:38.800 who are checking, it's not just equalization transfer programs, it's transfer programs writ large. Folks,
00:03:47.040 it's super important that we watch shows like this, and that we see clips like this, and that we share
00:03:53.200 information like this. Be sure that you don't miss out on this. Head on over to Juno News,
00:03:58.960 become a subscriber, so you can spread the word.