Western Standard - November 07, 2023


Canada's Premiers stand in solidarity on the carbon tax

Mentioned
David Eby Houston
Home heating oil exemption for the carbon tax CMS： Is the Trudeau⧸Singh alliance preparing to hit Canadian oil companies？

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

155.94

Word count

703

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Learn English with Alberta s Premier Rachel Notley. In this episode, Rachel talks with Saskatchewan s Premier, David Eby, about the challenges facing her province as it transitions from coal to natural gas in the home heating and cooling system.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Issue of housing and specifically limiting unilateral discussions, is there concern that the federal government is overstepping through programs or undermining the provincial authority through programs like the Housing Accelerator Fund?
00:00:11.520 And is there concern that you could potentially slow down funding by limiting those unilateral discussions?
00:00:17.500 Well, it seems to be working for Quebec. They have a law, M30, which requires the federal government to negotiate with them directly rather than go through the municipalities.
00:00:27.960 That's what we'll be looking at in our province. And you can't argue with success.
00:00:31.880 They just announced $900 million for housing as a result of negotiating on behalf of all of their municipalities.
00:00:38.020 And now all of their municipalities will have an equal opportunity to access those funds.
00:00:43.220 What we're worried about is the last tranche of dollars that were announced for my province were 14% of the population and we got 2.5% of the funding.
00:00:52.060 And so we need fairness. We need equity. And we're not seeing that with the current model.
00:00:57.560 So if defending our jurisdiction by passing legislation similar to Quebec assists us in being able to get fair treatment, then that's what we're going to do.
00:01:07.740 Alberta has a similar history to Saskatchewan, having taken great effort many years ago to convert to natural gas home heating.
00:01:15.520 But in addition, the early phase out of coal, which has cost our province literally billions of dollars to do it seven years early,
00:01:22.740 only to be surprised by additional taxes being levied at the federal level.
00:01:26.560 So we believe very strongly that natural gas should be treated as a cleaner fuel.
00:01:32.300 We know that the export of LNG internationally is going to be able to reduce dirtier fuels, coal and wood and dung.
00:01:41.000 And in fact, we've already seen what happens in jurisdictions that don't have access to clean natural gas.
00:01:46.160 They convert back to coal.
00:01:47.400 So if this is truly a global problem, then we need global thinking and global solutions.
00:01:52.360 And we should be exporting more of our cleaner fuel to reduce global emissions and not punishing our customers here at home.
00:01:59.480 It's not our customers' fault that the alternatives are not available to them.
00:02:03.360 I do not share David Eby's, Premier Eby's enthusiasm for heat pumps, because in our province, they don't work particularly well at below minus 25.
00:02:14.660 You can't get insurance without having a backup to your heat pump.
00:02:18.100 And so it's not really a credible option in our province.
00:02:21.820 There may be other options that emerge in future with technology.
00:02:24.100 But in the meantime, all this is doing is just causing unfairness, making life less affordable, and really harming our most vulnerable as we get into the winter season.
00:02:33.100 And I'll also thank Premier Houston.
00:02:35.340 He introduced us to individuals who had quite a bit of success in recruiting from the Philippines to bring more nurses into the system, I believe, in the long-term care area.
00:02:43.740 We're working on that same kind of approach.
00:02:45.820 So I suspect what you'll see is the Premier's working very diligently and collaboratively to try to recruit from abroad, whether it's Philippines or another nation.
00:02:55.580 And then also working on foreign credentials recognition, as well as recognizing the credentials across the country, so that there is the ability to move seamlessly between jurisdictions.
00:03:04.960 And we are working on enhancing the number of spaces that are available in our institutions, training more medical professionals in rural communities, so they stay in rural communities.
00:03:17.700 We're hoping to be able to grow our own supply here.
00:03:20.820 And one other thing that we did talk about is the reason why medical professionals are compelled to go either locum or agency nurses,
00:03:30.500 and do we need to do some work on addressing some of the working conditions that our nurses and doctors find themselves in in our hospitals. 0.98
00:03:40.000 In Alberta, I discovered that the last Council of the Federation meeting, we only have 38 percent of our nurses willing to work full-time.
00:03:48.220 So perhaps addressing some of the reasons why nurses don't want to take on full-time positions may be a solution without having to go and recruit from other provinces. 0.77
00:04:00.500 For more information, please visit www.fema.org.