The Alberta Roundup with Isaac Lamoureux - June 17, 2023


Smith teases Conservative coalition

Topics
judicial recounts in Alberta elections gender ideology in schools
Hosted by
Isaac Lamoureux
Mentioned
Danielle Smith Rachel Notley Sheila Annette Lewis Rachel Emanuel Acadia Jonathan Wilkinson Elections Alberta Harold Lipschitz Dominic LeBlanc Tyler Shandro Dan Bodondi Jason Kenney Dave Prisco Scott Moe Bill Cox Tom Corr Saskatchewan Trudeau Pierre Bench and 1 more
Smith announces arson investigation Inside AHS’ bid to rehire Deena Hinshaw

Episode Stats


Length

15 minutes

Words per minute

176.8

Word count

2,781

Sentence count

157

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is prepared to form a coalition with like-minded provinces to fight Ottawa's energy policies. We re also going to be taking a look at whether or not Danielle Smith was censored earlier this week. Meanwhile, Rachel Notley said she s going to take some time to consider her role as party leader. 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 .
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 Hey everyone, welcome back to the Alberta Roundup. I'm your host, Rachel Emanuel.
00:00:04.020 I hope that you guys are having a great week so far. Let's take a look at today's topics.
00:00:09.460 Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is prepared to form a coalition with like-minded provinces
00:00:14.120 to fight Ottawa's energy policies. We're also going to be taking a look at Facebook.
00:00:19.580 Was Danielle Smith censored earlier this week? Meanwhile, you guys will be interested to hear
00:00:24.280 this. Rachel Notley said that she is going to take some time to consider her role as party
00:00:29.820 leader. All that and more happening now on the Alberta Roundup.
00:00:44.400 Okay guys, up first, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said she's prepared to form a coalition
00:00:49.540 with like-minded provinces to fight Ottawa's energy policies. The Trudeau government plans
00:00:55.840 to impose an emissions cap on Canada's oil and gas sector and to introduce regulations
00:01:00.620 for a net zero electricity grid by 2035. On Tuesday, after speaking at the Global Energy
00:01:07.440 Show in Calgary, Smith said, quote, I prefer collaboration as the first option. I think
00:01:13.620 I have drawn the line in the sand. I've already raised it with my provincial counterparts that
00:01:18.500 if we need to develop a coalition so that we can fight back against Ottawa, if need be,
00:01:22.880 then that's what we're going to do. Those allies include Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe,
00:01:27.800 who told a conference that it would be impossible for his province to move to a net zero electricity
00:01:33.160 grid by 2035. About two thirds of Saskatchewan's electricity is powered by natural gas and to
00:01:39.280 a lesser extent, coal. Moe told media on Tuesday, quote, quite simply, it isn't attainable in Saskatchewan
00:01:45.120 and quite frankly, isn't attainable in many other jurisdictions either.
00:01:49.600 They, meaning Ottawa, come forward with unconsulted, ideological and unrealistic policies time and
00:01:56.440 time again. And now these policies are layering on top of one another. Federal Natural Resources
00:02:01.580 Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc will fly to Ottawa
00:02:07.620 next week to meet with the Premier. Smith said she's hopeful they can find common ground on the
00:02:12.980 issue. Moving into our next story here, Meta, the company that runs Facebook, is disputing
00:02:18.700 Alberta Premier Danielle Smith's claims that she was banned from her Facebook account. On Wednesday,
00:02:24.800 Smith took to Twitter to say that the social media site had banned her from using her account.
00:02:30.000 She wrote, quote, big tech and government censorship is becoming a danger to free speech around the
00:02:35.040 world. She also noted that she's premier of a province of over 4 million people. And if they can
00:02:41.120 lock her out of her account, she wondered what they could do to the rest of us. But Meta says no
00:02:46.700 restrictions were ever placed on the Premier's account. In a statement to Postmedia, a Meta
00:02:51.500 spokesperson said, quote, there were no restrictions placed on the Premier's page. One of the page's
00:02:57.700 administrators faced restrictions, but that did not impact the underlying page's ability to post
00:03:03.060 content. Shortly after that response became public, Smith returned to Twitter to say that her
00:03:08.500 Facebook account had been reinstated. She said, quote, happy to report my page is able to post on
00:03:14.280 Facebook again. This was the error that appeared on my page. I hope this is the last time it happens.
00:03:20.820 For those of you who are listening to the audio and not watching, she included a screenshot of the
00:03:25.900 message she had received on Facebook, which said, sorry, you can't post to Facebook from this account.
00:03:31.480 For security reasons, your account has limited access to the site for a few days. The Premier's office
00:03:37.380 did not respond to my request for clarification about whether in fact they had been banned from
00:03:43.260 Facebook or it was simply the mistake of one administrator who had been locked out. For those
00:03:48.820 of us who use Facebook, we know how arbitrary it can be. Sometimes you go into your site and you have
00:03:54.420 been locked out of it for seemingly no apparent reason. I'll never forget a couple of years ago,
00:03:59.220 I had posted something on Facebook Marketplace and all of a sudden Facebook had informed me that I had
00:04:04.420 violated its terms of service and that I was no longer able to use Facebook Marketplace. I had absolutely
00:04:10.640 no idea what I did wrong and I sent them a message requesting to appeal their decision and also just
00:04:17.180 to get a little more information about what had happened. I did not receive a response and I was
00:04:21.600 banned from Marketplace for about a year until I eventually sent them another appeal and they
00:04:26.200 decided to let me back on. To this day, I have no idea what I did and I know that those experiences
00:04:32.260 are very similar for those of us who use Facebook. That being said, it could also be the case that
00:04:36.900 one administrator tried to log onto the premier's page in this case, wasn't able to do so and they
00:04:41.880 quickly were led to the conclusion that the entire page had been blocked by Facebook. I doubt Danielle
00:04:48.480 Smith herself came to that conclusion. Obviously, she has people who are running her social media
00:04:52.560 accounts for her and it could have been the mistake of one of those individuals. But let me know what you
00:04:57.360 guys think in the comments below and I will get to some of those comments next week.
00:05:02.340 It's the family and friends event at Shoppers Drug Mart. Get 20% off almost all regular priced
00:05:08.060 merchandise. Two days only. Tuesday, February 24th and Wednesday, February 25th. Open your PC Optimum app
00:05:14.960 to get your coupon.
00:05:18.400 Okay guys, moving into a True North exclusive, I have been covering this story pretty closely
00:05:23.700 ever since the Alberta provincial election. But Tyler Shandro and Whitney Isik have both decided
00:05:29.620 to proceed judicial recounts in their respective ridings of Calgary Acadia and Calgary Glenmore.
00:05:35.880 We know that both those ridings were decided by less than 100 votes. Of course, last week I brought
00:05:41.480 you guys the official recounts, which increased the number of bouts for the NDP in both cases,
00:05:47.480 but still both ridings were decided by less than 50 votes. In Calgary Acadia,
00:05:53.280 it was determined that the NDP MLA elect Diana Batten had won by 25 votes following the recount.
00:06:00.880 Over in Calgary Glenmore, the NDP candidate won by 42 votes. So still pretty close margins on both
00:06:06.920 sides there. And the UCP has decided to proceed with that judicial recount where they will argue
00:06:12.400 the specifics of each ballot before a judge in hopes of turning the tides in their favor.
00:06:19.240 Now, I should also note that I have been told and Elections Alberta has confirmed to me that while
00:06:24.760 they did undergo official recounts in both those ridings, because they were decided by less than 100
00:06:30.000 votes, they still relied on the tabulators to calculate the advanced votes in those ridings.
00:06:37.920 Some conservative strategists I have spoken with have said they would like to see each and every one
00:06:43.060 of those ballots recounted by hand. The Elections Alberta said they use the tabulators to recount
00:06:48.700 the advanced vote and that if a judicial recount is requested at that time, they would proceed with
00:06:54.220 recounting those ballots by hand. So I suspect that is maybe one of the reasons why they decided to
00:06:59.640 proceed with this judicial recount. I should also mention that people working on those campaigns
00:07:04.420 have a pretty good sense of what those ballots look like. I did hear some reports that in some of the
00:07:10.480 ridings, voters had actually written Rachel Notley on the ballot. You can write in the UCP or the NDP,
00:07:17.880 but it gets a little bit trickier when a voter is writing in Rachel Notley's name because she was a
00:07:23.720 candidate in an entirely another riding. So the argument could be made that that voter was attempting
00:07:28.860 to cast a ballot for a different riding altogether. So I suspect these are some of the issues that we're
00:07:33.920 going to see come up in the judicial recount. UCP spokesperson Dave Prisco also told me, quote,
00:07:39.380 in light of the close election results in Calgary Acadia and Calgary Glenmore, the United Conservative
00:07:45.360 Party candidates in those electoral districts have filed for judicial recounts. This action,
00:07:51.300 taken with full respect for the electoral process, reinforces our firm commitment to complete
00:07:56.600 transparency. It enables a thorough examination, especially of the yet to be reviewed advanced
00:08:03.440 polling ballots to ensure intention of each eligible vote is accurately accounted for. So in his statement
00:08:09.780 there, we can see him alluding to what I was referring to about the tabulators doing the recount for
00:08:15.220 the advanced polls. The party would like to see those counted by hand. And I'm told this process is going
00:08:20.700 to take about a month all in all. So I'll have an update for you guys in a few weeks. Moving into the
00:08:25.720 controversy of the week here, the Supreme Court of Canada will not hear the case of a dying unvaccinated
00:08:32.920 woman who has been denied an organ transplant. We have talked about Sheila Annette Lewis on a number of
00:08:38.880 occasions on this show, and I have just learned that she will not be able to bring her case to the Supreme
00:08:44.840 Court. Of course, she was denied that life-saving organ transplant because she refused to be vaccinated 0.99
00:08:51.300 against COVID-19. And it looks like she's nearing the end of her legal road. In an interview with
00:08:57.260 Rebel News, Lewis said the Supreme Court of Canada owes her an answer as to why they won't hear her
00:09:03.000 case. She said, quote, this is the highest court in Canada that doesn't want to do right by the people
00:09:09.480 of Canada. Lewis was unsuccessful at both the Alberta Court of Queen's Bench and the Alberta Court of Appeal
00:09:15.780 in 2022. With both levels finding that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms does not apply to
00:09:22.440 COVID-19 vaccine policies of Alberta Health Services, the Alberta hospital where Lewis would have received
00:09:29.580 her transplant or her transplant doctors. Both courts also dismissed Lewis's case under the Alberta
00:09:36.540 Bill of Rights. In November, the appeal court ruled that without a transplant, it is a, quote,
00:09:42.100 virtual certainty and, quote, that Lewis will die. Lewis has now filed a negligence claim to Alberta
00:09:49.020 Health Services. Under new lawyers, she was previously using the Justice Center for Constitutional
00:09:53.620 Freedoms. She has now moved over to a different lawyer and she is awaiting a court date on that case. 0.94
00:10:00.160 Here's what she had to say about it in an interview with Rebel News.
00:10:02.940 Well, it's my life. What do they want me to do? To sit back here in this place in my home and just die?
00:10:12.100 Is that what they want me to do? Of course they do. They want me to go away. They want me to stop.
00:10:17.780 They want me to shut up. That was the purpose of the gay court. Why? You tell me. 1.00
00:10:25.420 Nobody is saying, and no high official is even saying anything about it. The media will not contact me.
00:10:32.760 The media will not cover my story. Like MSN, like CTV, CBC, Edmonton, CTV. Nobody. Nobody will touch this story.
00:10:43.560 Why? Are they that scared? Because of what's going on?
00:10:48.120 Why are people denied life-saving surgeries? Not just me, but all over Canada is people being denied life-saving surgeries.
00:10:59.620 Some say the bubbles in an Aero Truffle piece can take 34 seconds to melt in your mouth.
00:11:04.380 Sometimes the very amount you're stuck at the same red light.
00:11:07.860 Rich, creamy, chocolatey Aero Truffle. Feel the Aero Bubbles melt. It's mind bubbling.
00:11:13.880 Okay, guys, moving into what we're watching in the weeks to come.
00:11:17.940 Does Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley have plans to resign?
00:11:22.060 In a press conference earlier this week, Rachel Notley said she will take some time to consider her role as party leader.
00:11:28.220 On May 29, the Alberta NDP secured 38 seats to Danielle Smith's UCP's 49 seats.
00:11:35.600 That marks the second time Rachel Notley failed to form government since losing government to Jason Kenney's UCP in 2019 after just one term in office.
00:11:48.260 Notley said she will consider a range of factors that will take too long to outline.
00:11:53.620 She also said she doesn't know when she will have an answer.
00:11:57.400 I do think it's interesting how little information Rachel Notley had on this process.
00:12:01.380 I would be curious as to what some of the things that she's going to be looking at, for example, as to whether she should stay on.
00:12:07.660 But that leads me to my question of the week.
00:12:10.940 Will Rachel Notley resign?
00:12:12.840 Comment on the video below and let me know what you think.
00:12:15.540 Is she holding on for another four years or is she going to step aside and let someone else have their shot? 1.00
00:12:22.920 Okay, guys, and now it's time for my weekly comment roundup.
00:12:26.820 Stay tuned to see if I included your comments in this week's show.
00:12:30.120 So user CrimsonDragon said,
00:12:32.300 I like Danielle, but I hope she will also reign in the out-of-control activism in the 2SLGBTQIA plus community. 1.00
00:12:41.760 I have nothing against a person's gender, but the violence and child grooming is a line you just do not cross and they crossed it. 0.96
00:12:49.140 They need to be held responsible.
00:12:51.200 Also, just establish a trans sport league so they can stop competing against biological women. 0.94
00:12:56.020 That is not fair, nor is it a good competitive environment.
00:13:00.120 I couldn't agree with you more.
00:13:01.960 I cannot stand when I see a biological woman lose out on a medal that they have worked so hard for to a biological man.
00:13:10.260 We know that bodies are just different and that it is not a fair competitive environment whatsoever.
00:13:15.440 However, I also hope to see some action taken on this and I think that we are seeing a lot of frustration rise across North America with the gender ideology that is being so pushed in schools right now.
00:13:29.060 User Harold Lipschitz says,
00:13:31.160 Thank you, Rachel, for your unbiased views.
00:13:33.720 There are two sides of the story to the row housing rejection.
00:13:37.700 Homeowners bought in the areas that they live in for specific reasons.
00:13:41.140 One of them being the R1 zoning.
00:13:44.100 Build a row housing in the new areas of construction so that they know exactly what they're getting when they buy.
00:13:49.760 Not changing the rules later and devaluing the property values of those who paid the price in the first place.
00:13:55.000 The part-time resident MPs who have weighed in on this have absolutely no clue or staking what would happen if this had gone through.
00:14:03.260 And no, it's not NIMBYism.
00:14:05.420 On the other note, yes, these mysterious wildfires need to be investigated by reliable sources.
00:14:09.920 Those are my thoughts.
00:14:10.800 So that was in response to my question last week about affordable housing.
00:14:15.400 Calgary City Council voted down a proposal to basically get more affordable housing built in the city
00:14:21.000 because many councillors were uncomfortable with the fact that it would change zoning within their regions
00:14:27.140 and they said their communities would never agree to it.
00:14:30.340 Then we had another comment on the other side with user Bill Cox saying,
00:14:33.900 townhouses and such are better looking than tents for homeless.
00:14:37.580 And finally, one other perspective from Tom Corr.
00:14:40.340 I'm not going to read his whole comment here, but he said basically,
00:14:43.320 if immigration was stopped, there would be plenty of affordable housing.
00:14:46.820 But instead, they want to tell those starting out that tearing down all the older rentals and starter houses
00:14:52.300 and replacing them with tiny and expensive new units
00:14:54.860 while simultaneously bringing in half a million people a year
00:14:57.880 that will compete for their living spaces and jobs will somehow make things better. 0.94
00:15:02.020 Pierre has some good policies, but this is definitely not one of them.
00:15:04.920 Young people aren't stupid, but if they're never told the truth,
00:15:08.120 they'll have a hard time figuring it out by themselves, just like anyone else. 0.99
00:15:11.580 There you guys have it.
00:15:12.420 There's so many different perspectives on the housing issue, just as I knew there would be.
00:15:16.800 I thought that the comment at the end about sustainable immigration levels
00:15:19.940 is a conversation we need to have more often.
00:15:23.920 It's also worth considering in light of our healthcare crisis,
00:15:27.260 can we provide family doctors for all of the people coming in?
00:15:30.780 Hint, we cannot.
00:15:31.760 Okay, guys, that's all I have time for today.
00:15:34.480 Thank you so much for tuning in.
00:15:36.200 As always, if you're able, please consider supporting our work over at donate.tnc.news.
00:15:41.940 Have a great weekend and God bless.