The Alberta Roundup with Isaac Lamoureux - April 27, 2025


Albertans cast advance ballots in record numbers

Topics
Chinese oil imports and exports
Hosted by
Isaac Lamoureux
Mentioned
Randy Boissoneau Mark Carney Eleanor Olszewski Danielle Smith Saeed Ahmed Pierre Poilievre Justin Trudeau Rachel Notley Sam Harris Bill C-63
Smith criticizes Carney’s conflicting pipeline stance First Nations can’t veto Alberta separation vote

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

170.54

Word count

1,562

Sentence count

81

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode of the Alberta Roundup, we take a look at what we learned from advanced polling and the large number of Albertans who voted ahead of election day. We also explore how China is turning to Alberta for oil due to its ongoing trade war with the United States, and remind you about Mark Carney's ties with China.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 Canada's federal election will occur tomorrow, on Monday, April 28th, and True North will
00:00:15.000 be providing content from across the nation.
00:00:17.560 As for this show, we'll take a quick look at what we learned from advanced polling and
00:00:21.560 the large proportion of Albertans that voted ahead of election day.
00:00:25.320 The Edmonton Centre riding will also be an interesting riding to watch this election,
00:00:29.600 as this will determine who takes over Randy Boissoneau's seat after he was forced to
00:00:33.880 step down in November by former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau following Boissoneau's many
00:00:38.920 scandals.
00:00:39.920 We'll also explore how China is turning to Alberta for oil due to its ongoing trade war
00:00:45.040 with the United States, and remind you about Mark Carney's ties with China.
00:00:49.600 My name's Isaac Lamoureux, and I'll cover all of these stories on the Alberta Roundup
00:00:53.200 today.
00:00:54.200 Let's hop into that first story now.
00:00:55.700 So while there's not much time left to speculate about the election results, as we'll know who
00:00:59.480 Canada's next Prime Minister is by tomorrow, Alberta is looking like it will be more blue
00:01:04.400 than the rest of the country.
00:01:06.280 As of Thursday's projections, 338 Canada projects that Alberta would see 31 out of 37 federal
00:01:12.960 districts go Conservative, with 5 to the Liberals and 1 to the NDP.
00:01:17.760 While I know it may be surprising that the NDP will win a seat given their party's downfall,
00:01:22.840 this is of course projected in Edmonton Strathcona, an NDP bastion both federally and provincially.
00:01:28.760 Rachel Notley dominated the seat provincially between 2008 and 2024, and it has been similarly
00:01:34.560 held federally since then.
00:01:36.560 Currently, in Alberta, the Liberals hold two seats, as do the NDP, while the Conservatives
00:01:41.440 hold 30 for a total of 34 districts.
00:01:44.240 However, Alberta will be home to 37 districts this federal election.
00:01:48.560 Two of the districts expected to lean towards the Liberals are in Calgary, while one is in
00:01:52.800 Edmonton, in the Edmonton Centre riding.
00:01:55.360 Then, 338 Canada has three Calgary ridings as toss-ups between the Liberals and Conservatives.
00:02:00.360 Edmonton has five toss-ups between the two parties.
00:02:03.360 Every single riding outside of the two major cities in Alberta is considered to be a safe
00:02:08.440 Conservative seat.
00:02:09.360 Still, no other region is projected to have a Conservative representation like Alberta.
00:02:14.400 In second place is the Prairies, which is projected to have 19 out of 28 federal districts be Conservative,
00:02:20.040 followed by seven Liberal ridings and two NDP ridings.
00:02:23.160 Overall, however, 338 Canada is projecting a Liberal majority as of Thursday.
00:02:29.040 But some have raised concerns about Canada's most popular poll aggregator.
00:02:32.880 Juneau News conducted its own poll, showing the Liberals and Conservatives were in a dead
00:02:36.800 tie at 39% as of Wednesday.
00:02:39.560 Juneau News' poll was conducted by one persuasion among 1,507 Canadians, with a margin of error
00:02:46.120 of 2.5%, 19 times out of 20.
00:02:49.480 Juneau News also ran a seat model, which projected a Liberal minority.
00:02:53.920 Some have suggested online that the record-breaking numbers at advanced polling proves that Canadians
00:02:58.840 are eager for change and that the polls may be wrong, similar to what happened with Kamala Harris
00:03:04.160 in the United States.
00:03:05.520 Elections Canada estimated that around 7.3 million Canadians casted their advanced ballots
00:03:11.440 between April 18th and 21st, which was a new record and a 20% increase in turnout at advanced
00:03:17.400 polls compared to 2021.
00:03:19.680 As for the provinces that saw the biggest representation of voters show up in advance, I ran some rough
00:03:24.360 calculations based on slightly outdated total electoral lists, but the Atlantic region actually
00:03:29.480 came out ahead, with around 33% of PEI voters showing up in advance, followed by 32% of those
00:03:36.040 in New Brunswick, and around 27% of Albertan voters casted their ballots in advance.
00:03:41.400 The lowest percentage of a population that voted in advance was in Nunavut, where only around 4.5%
00:03:47.000 of residents went in advance. Maybe that's because they aren't expecting big waits on election day.
00:03:52.680 Over the advanced polling period, some Canadians reported waiting for hours in line.
00:03:57.800 We saw a few interesting advanced polling stories come out of Alberta.
00:04:01.320 Firstly, the polling station in Crossfield saw such a high turnout that the station ran out of ballots.
00:04:08.520 A spokesperson for Elections Canada told True North that they were notified of the shortage
00:04:13.080 and that it was rectified within the hour.
00:04:15.880 There were also complaints about two Northern Albertan villages from residents who had their
00:04:20.680 polling stations removed and had to end up driving long distances to their closest station.
00:04:25.800 Elections Canada also revealed that they were still short hundreds of volunteers in four
00:04:30.280 Alberta ridings. Hopefully the problem can be sorted and no issues occur on election day.
00:04:35.800 But moving on to our next story now, we'll take a quick look into a specific Albertan riding.
00:04:41.240 Despite resigning from cabinet in November, Randy Boissoneau did not vacate his seat as the MP for
00:04:47.080 Edmonton Centre. However, he did announce in March that he would not be seeking re-election.
00:04:52.200 Despite the many controversies that plagued Randy, the new Liberal candidate, Eleanor Olszewski,
00:04:57.640 will be in a tight race with Conservative candidate Saeed Ahmed.
00:05:01.480 Going back to polling, as of Thursday, 338 Canada has the writing at 43% votes Liberal,
00:05:06.680 38% Conservative, and 16% NDP. The poll aggregator gives the Conservatives a 22%
00:05:13.720 chance of winning the writing. The Liberals replaced Boissoneau, who had the controversy
00:05:18.040 surrounding his company, getting federal contracts, and his false Indigenous claims. However, they
00:05:23.640 replaced him with Olszewski, a senior lawyer, army reservist, and pharmacist. Saeed Ahmed is a senior
00:05:29.480 official in the Alberta Department of Health and came to Canada after being born into famine and civil war
00:05:35.160 in Somalia. Since the last election, the writing's boundaries have shifted, meaning the Conservatives
00:05:40.360 would have actually won by 700 votes under its current boundaries. The NDP also did pretty well
00:05:46.200 in the last election, and are expected to perform much worse this time around. The writing of Edmonton's
00:05:51.480 downtown core has a younger population than average, with only 16% of people being 65 or older. Nearly 3 in
00:05:58.440 10 households in the writing make $100,000 yearly or more, and a third of the population are visible
00:06:04.440 minorities. Definitely a hot seat to watch, and we'll see whether that seat will flip from the 1.00
00:06:09.720 Liberals to the Conservatives, or whether people will forget about Randy. But hopping into our next
00:06:14.680 story, which is about China turning away from US oil and ramping up Canadian imports. According to
00:06:21.000 Bloomberg, Chinese refiners have slashed US oil purchase by roughly 90% in recent months, while setting
00:06:28.200 new records for Canadian imports. In March alone, 7.3 million barrels were shipped from Canada's Pacific
00:06:34.840 coast to China, a figure expected to grow further this month. Conversely, Chinese oil imports from the
00:06:41.560 US have fallen from 29 million barrels in June to 3 million barrels monthly. Bloomberg said that the
00:06:47.720 turning point came after the Trans Mountain Expansion Project opened last May, increasing Albertan oil
00:06:53.240 exports to British Columbia's Pacific coast, and expanding access to Alberta's oil sands for Asian
00:06:59.160 buyers. China still imports more oil from Russia and the Middle East than from North America. Still,
00:07:04.680 Canadian oil sands provide reliable and quality crude oil that China's refineries can process,
00:07:09.640 while reducing China's reliance on coal and other climate-damaging energy sources. The surge in Canadian 0.98
00:07:15.320 oil exports comes amid rising scrutiny of Liberal leader Mark Carney's anti-oil stance and ties to China.
00:07:22.040 Alberta Premier Daniel Smith previously called out Carney for his continuous flip-flop on Canada's
00:07:27.240 energy future and his vague, non-committal responses on key issues. She said, quote,
00:07:32.840 So it would appear Carney is now just fine with Canada continuing to be 100% reliant on the United
00:07:38.520 States to purchase all of our oil and gas, and to purchase all of the fuel used by Ontario and Quebec
00:07:43.880 from the US through Line 5. Carney had previously told Smith he opposed Bill C-69, dubbed the No More Pipelines
00:07:50.840 bill, only to reverse course later and defend it. He also flip-flopped on supporting an oil and gas
00:07:56.120 production cap, changing his position within days. Smith previously said, quote,
00:08:01.160 This has been the same story for the last 10 years. Liberals come to Alberta, smile for the cameras,
00:08:06.200 tell everyone how much they are going to work with Alberta and support the energy sector. Then they
00:08:10.520 leave, go home, and proceed to do everything in their power to roadblock and scare away investment from
00:08:16.040 the energy sector. Conservative leader Pierre Polyèvre has been calling out Carney's inconsistent energy
00:08:21.560 positions and foreign entanglement for years. Polyèvre said to Carney during a 2021 committee
00:08:26.600 hearing, quote, It's a double standard. You make billions of dollars off foreign pipelines and you
00:08:31.960 shut them down here at home, putting our people out of work. He also said that China was helping Carney
00:08:37.560 in this election. Polyèvre said, quote, Beijing has interfered both in the liberal leadership race,
00:08:42.760 helping Mark Carney, and again in the general election to support Mr. Carney. The election
00:08:47.640 results could affect Canada's future with China and the United States. The results, of course,
00:08:52.840 will be in tomorrow. And again, True North will be covering it from coast to coast during election day.
00:08:58.920 That wraps up this week's show. My name's Isaac Lamoureux,
00:09:01.880 your host of the Alberta Roundup. Have a great weekend, thank you, and God bless.
00:09:07.560 Thank you.