Western Standard - January 27, 2023


CBC must put up or shut up

Hosted by
Nigel Hannaford
Mentioned
Danielle Smith
Smith says Alberta and Ottawa at 'crossroads' with 'Just Transition,' wants meet with PM Freedom Convoy lawyer： “Trudeau should not get secret copy” of Emergencies Act Inquiry report

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

119.88

Word count

568

Sentence count

58


Summary

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

A bunch of hot button issues have been going on between the offices of Alberta s premier, Danielle Smith, and Alberta s Crown prosecutors. The CBC says they have evidence, but the government says they don't have them. What's the problem?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's talk about these hot-button emails that supposedly passed between the offices of Premier
00:00:05.380 Danielle Smith and Alberta's Crown Prosecutors. Let's start with the CBC. If I were them,
00:00:13.260 I'd be a bit uncomfortable right now. The CBC says it has a source who says they have these messages.
00:00:21.780 Their story is that a staffer in Smith's office sent a series of emails to the Alberta Crown
00:00:27.600 Prosecution Service challenging prosecutors' assessment and direction on cases stemming
00:00:34.560 from the Coutts border blockades and protests. Now, there should be no problem with a government
00:00:42.120 seeking blanket amnesty for an entire group. What would most definitely be a problem would be
00:00:49.840 interference with individual cases? If that's what happened, it's a huge story. And with four months
00:01:00.480 to an election, the consequences for the United Conservative Party could be disastrous.
00:01:07.980 The source would know that. So would the CBC. That's something to keep in mind when you're
00:01:18.400 trying to figure out what's going on here. Personally, however, I think the CBC has taken
00:01:26.100 a huge chance. They'd better be able to back up this story.
00:01:31.320 Look, leaks are the stuff of news reporting. Heaven knows the Western Standard lives on them.
00:01:39.880 During the dog days of the Kenney administration, we once got live feed from a caucus meeting.
00:01:45.320 Doesn't get much leakier than that. But you have to be careful. If somebody told me they had something
00:01:55.400 really juicy on somebody I would like to see lose an election. And they swore on a whole stack of Bibles
00:02:03.800 that they had personally seen damning evidence, but couldn't show it to me. I wouldn't put their name
00:02:11.000 to it for fear of career repercussions. I wouldn't touch it. At the very least,
00:02:18.600 the very least, even if I wasn't going to publish the evidence, I would want to see it.
00:02:28.440 But the CBC didn't even do that. When they broke the story, we assumed they had at least
00:02:36.360 been shown these emails. But it was only in a later update that the CBC specifically said
00:02:45.480 they had not viewed the emails. Neither apparently has the government of Alberta.
00:02:52.920 The offices of the Premier and the Justice Minister have conducted a search and say
00:02:57.640 nothing came to light. A million emails were inspected. Meanwhile, the CBC digs in.
00:03:08.440 There's an easy way to end this. If these emails exist, the CBC should produce them.
00:03:15.880 How hard can that be? If they say what the CBC says they say, the CBC is in the clear.
00:03:26.920 And it's the Smith government that has some explaining to do.
00:03:34.360 Otherwise, the CBC should retract this story.
00:03:38.920 That can't scrub the smear, of course. Smith haters will still believe it.
00:03:46.920 But that would be the right thing and the honorable thing for the CBC to do.
00:03:52.120 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.
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