The Alberta Roundup with Isaac Lamoureux - December 16, 2023


Smith calls Guilbeault “awful” and “dangerous”

Topics
opioid crisis in Alberta
Hosted by
Isaac Lamoureux
Mentioned
Stephen Guibault Danielle Smith Justin Trudeau Rebecca Schultz Mike Ellis Rachel Cook Chrystia Freeland Maria Zakharova Rachel Emanuel Devin Drieschen Michael Brown Dan Williams Jimmy Campbell Aaron Gunn Izzard P. Marie
Alberta won’t be bullied by Ottawa： Smith Smith trashes Trudeau’s EV mandate

Episode Stats


Length

10 minutes

Words per minute

174.8

Word count

1,891

Sentence count

103

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Environment Minister Stephen Guibault has been in hot water with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz, who have called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to immediately replace him. We also look at the Alberta government's move to raise the damage threshold beyond which motorists involved in a collision must report to the police. And finally, the University of Alberta removed Christmas trees on campus after a student asked if she could display a menorah. All that and more happening now on The Alberta Roundup.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Alberta Roundup. I'm your host, Rachel Emanuel.
00:00:04.380 I hope that you guys are getting into that festive Christmas spirit.
00:00:07.660 It is one of my favorite times of the year. I've got my festive green sweater on.
00:00:12.360 I've been listening to a lot of Christmas music and I won't even tell you how long
00:00:15.960 my Christmas tree has been up for. If you guys have a favorite holiday song,
00:00:20.180 please let me know what it is in the comment section below. I'm getting a little tired of
00:00:24.740 my playlist and I need to freshen it up with some new music. Now let's take a look at what
00:00:29.380 we're going to be talking about on today's show. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has called
00:00:33.200 Federal Environment Minister Stephen Guibault dangerous to federation. She also piled on 0.64
00:00:38.620 with him with her Environment Minister Rebecca Schultz when they called on Prime Minister
00:00:43.120 Justin Trudeau to immediately replace Guibault. We're also going to be taking a look at the
00:00:47.860 Alberta government's move to raise the damage threshold beyond which motorists involved in
00:00:52.600 a collision must report to a police. And finally, faculty at the University of Alberta removed
00:00:57.900 Christmas trees on campus after a student asked if she could display a menorah. All that and more
00:01:04.540 happening now on the Alberta Roundup. Okay guys, taking a look at our first topic here, Alberta Premier
00:01:19.140 Danielle Smith said the door is shut to cooperative federation with Federal Environment Minister Stephen
00:01:25.560 Guibault, whom she also called awful. Smith made the comments in response to a question on the
00:01:32.420 Your Province, Your Premier radio show. She went on to say that Guibault is dangerous to the federation
00:01:37.860 because he acts outside the law. Take a listen to the exchange for yourself.
00:01:42.200 With the unconstitutional laws and announcements without conversation or consultation, what can or is
00:01:47.720 Alberta doing to try to have a cooperative relationship with the federal government or is that door shut?
00:01:54.700 Well, I can tell you, for me, it's shut with Stephen Guibault, the Environment Minister. He's awful.
00:01:59.700 He violates the law. He doesn't follow the Supreme Court judgments. And he acts in, as I've called it, 0.96
00:02:06.360 an imperious way. So I have very little interest in continuing any discussion with him. I can tell you,
00:02:12.600 I have a very good relationship with other ministers. I've given credit to Christia Freeland, who did a great
00:02:18.740 job of matching us and giving a generous carbon tax credit for carbon capture utilization and storage.
00:02:24.880 So I've got a good relationship with some ministers, but I'm not going to pretend to you that Stephen
00:02:30.080 Guibault is at all somebody we can work with. I think he's very dangerous, quite frankly. He's dangerous
00:02:34.740 to the federation. And he's dangerous because he doesn't honour the constitution and he acts outside the
00:02:41.640 law. And so we're going to make sure that we push back to the greatest extent possible on anything he
00:02:46.740 puts forward. Now, if you think the premier wasn't already harsh enough on Guibault, if that's even
00:02:52.080 possible, she later piled on him even further with her Environment Minister, Rebecca Schultz.
00:02:57.420 The pair called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to immediately replace Guibault. And they even called
00:03:03.480 his actions at COP28 a national embarrassment. Smith and Schultz released a joint statement after COP28
00:03:10.240 in response to the federal government's actions on climate policy. They wrote, quote,
00:03:15.660 We were gravely disappointed to see federal Minister of Environment and Climate Change,
00:03:20.340 Stephen Guibault, and other radical activists continue to push an approach that would consign
00:03:25.580 the world to energy poverty and economic stagnation by focusing only on ending all fossil fuel use.
00:03:32.920 It was a national embarrassment to witness Minister Guibault at an international conference actively
00:03:38.480 sabotaging the interests of Albertans and other Canadians by releasing a series of incoherent and
00:03:44.860 illegal policy pronouncements that he and his government have absolutely no legal authority
00:03:50.640 to impose upon the provinces of Canada. Now, the final wording ultimately did not recommend a full-on
00:03:56.880 phase-out, but nonetheless, Smith and Schultz said they will not forget Guibault's full-on crusade
00:04:03.060 against their energy sector. Moving into our next story here, the Alberta government has raised the
00:04:07.840 threshold upon which motorists must report a collision to the police from $2,000 to $5,000.
00:04:14.040 Transportation Minister Devin Drishan said the move will free up police resources and better reflect
00:04:19.960 the rising cost of auto repairs. He said, quote,
00:04:22.820 We look at just the cost of vehicle repairs and a minor fender bender of just bumping into someone's
00:04:28.580 bumper or taking out a light, it's very easy to surpass that threshold. We didn't want to make
00:04:33.720 just pretty much every fender bender have to be reported to the police, and that's why we increased
00:04:38.740 this limit. That increase will take effect on January 1st, and Drishan said he doesn't expect that the
00:04:43.460 changing threshold will impact insurance rates, adding, quote, We're looking at lots of options
00:04:48.520 to be able to roll out here hopefully in the new year to help address high insurance rates.
00:04:53.520 This next news story should offer some relief to those of us living in Calgary. The provincial
00:04:57.720 government is giving Calgary funding for 50 new permanent cop positions, according to Public Safety
00:05:03.360 Minister Mike Ellis, a former city cop himself. In a video posted to X, formerly known as Twitter,
00:05:09.860 Ellis related some of the shocking crimes ongoing in Alberta cities and blamed the federal government's
00:05:14.740 bail system.
00:05:15.420 These stories are heartbreaking when we consider the suffering of the victims and their families,
00:05:22.480 and they are equally frustrating when we hear about the alleged perpetrators. Random shootings,
00:05:30.280 random murders from alleged offenders who are apparently out on bail or release. Everyone knows that our bail
00:05:39.240 system is broken when repeat offenders can repeat crimes so easily. This bail system was brought in
00:05:47.260 by the Trudeau government, and it has been devastating for every province, not just Alberta.
00:05:54.860 Those crimes included a carjacking at gunpoint, which was allegedly done by an individual out on bail,
00:06:00.620 as well as the killing of a father of seven, also allegedly committed by an individual out at bail.
00:06:06.280 And he also spoke about the many stabbings at Calgary C train stations. Ellis said these are
00:06:11.280 just some of the violent attacks ongoing in Calgary that are making people feel unsafe.
00:06:15.920 While announcing the new funding, Ellis said random, unprovoked attacks on city streets used to be rare
00:06:22.000 occurrences, but now they're happening almost daily. He added, quote, this will not be tolerated.
00:06:27.480 Moving into the controversy of the week, a law student at the University of Alberta asked to display a
00:06:32.840 menorah on campus, and her request resulted in Christmas trees on campus being removed.
00:06:38.400 Rachel Cook, a Jewish student on campus, asked to display an electric menorah after noticing many of the
00:06:44.100 other Christmas decorations on campus, including, of course, Christmas trees, as well as garland and polar bears.
00:06:50.460 Her request was initially met with excitement, but later the vice dean emailed her to express concerns.
00:06:55.880 He said that existing decorations on campus were meant to be non-denominational. He instead offered
00:07:02.180 her a bookable room where she could light and display the menorah, and shortly after, Christmas
00:07:06.580 trees were taken down on campus, while other decorations like polar bears and the garland were kept up.
00:07:12.200 Cook said she never took issue with the Christmas trees and was shocked to learn of such an overreaction.
00:07:17.920 She said, quote,
00:07:18.540 I got an email from the vice dean telling me, no trees either. We're going to take all those down
00:07:24.060 because of your concerns. That's when I responded, but I don't have concerns. I actually find them
00:07:28.960 quite pretty. I just wanted to display a menorah. Cook said she believes faculty decided to take down
00:07:34.520 the trees because they didn't want her putting up a menorah over their incorrect belief that it would
00:07:39.680 be a display in support of Israel. Michael Brown, a spokesperson at the University of Alberta,
00:07:44.240 said some decorations were removed in order to maintain the intent of seasonal decorations,
00:07:50.420 which is to be secularly festive. Moving into what we're watching in the weeks to come,
00:07:55.500 Alberta has seen a sharp increase in opioid related deaths. This is a very difficult news story,
00:08:01.140 especially headed into the holidays, but that is an increase of over 25% of opioid related deaths
00:08:07.640 when compared to the same period last year. In September alone, Edmonton reported 62 drug poisoning
00:08:13.920 deaths, 60 of which involved opioids. And as of September, Edmonton experienced an increase in
00:08:20.080 opioid related fatalities compared to the previous year with 492 opioid poisonings reported in the
00:08:26.580 first nine months. That is far surpassing the 428 deaths recorded during the same period in 2022.
00:08:34.080 Provincially, the situation is equally as grim. A total of 1,411 Albertans succumbed to opioid
00:08:40.940 poisoning so far, which is a steep rise from the 1,124 who died from opioid related deaths last year.
00:08:48.520 A spokesperson for mental health and addictions minister, Dan Williams, said these numbers are why
00:08:53.260 Alberta is so focused on a recovery orientated system of care. The spokesperson said, quote,
00:08:59.480 every life lost from the deadly disease of addiction is a tragedy and it reinforces our focus
00:09:04.660 on making recovery possible for every Albertan. For those of you who want to dig into this issue a
00:09:09.740 little further, I would encourage you to watch Canada is Dying and Vancouver is Dying. Those are
00:09:15.080 two excellent documentaries made by friend of the show, Aaron Gunn, and they really shed a light on
00:09:20.740 how federal government policies are creating this national drug crisis. Finally, moving into our
00:09:26.380 weekly comment roundup, our first comment here is from Jim Campbell. He says, no one in Alberta voted
00:09:30.860 for Guibo and no one should concede anything to a creep like that. Hey, he said it, not me. He added,
00:09:37.740 the days of Albertans paying for liberal votes in Quebec while Ottawa tries to crush their incomes
00:09:43.320 are done. Our next comment here is from Maria Zacharias. She writes, this is a hard job for Premier
00:09:48.680 Danielle in this time. I pray she will be able to stay strong and not waver under the dictatorship of
00:09:54.280 the Liberals and Trudeau. Alberta is the only province doing well and we will stand behind
00:09:59.540 Danielle to keep our province strong. Marie, I really appreciated that call just to remind people
00:10:03.520 to pray for the Premier. Pray that she has the strength to withstand the pressure that she is
00:10:08.320 facing. We should actually pray for all our political leaders, even, and I know I'm going to get a little
00:10:12.460 hate for this, Justin Trudeau. We should pray that he finally recognizes that he is unfit for office
00:10:18.080 and that he resigns. And our comment of the week goes to user Izzard P. He writes, good news. Canada
00:10:23.800 has so many trees that we are already carbon negative. Great job, everyone. Planet saved.
00:10:29.660 Well, there's no arguing with that. And with that, that's all I have for you guys today. Thank you so
00:10:34.100 much for tuning in. Please don't forget to let me know what your favorite Christmas song is
00:10:37.980 in the comment section. I will see you guys next week. Have a great weekend and God bless.
00:10:48.080 Bye.