Western Standard - November 27, 2023


Conservatives are demanding openness, transparency and answers

Topics
tax contracts
Mentioned
Kuzmarachuk Souza
The failed attempt of Edmonton bureaucrats to control media Alberta goes full bore on carbon capture ahead of COP28

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

127.68

Word count

304

Sentence count

14


Summary

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

In this episode, I discuss a motion that was brought forward by the Conservative Party of Canada, asking for access to government contracts and documents. The motion was voted down by the committee, and I talk about why I believe it should be seen.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 This is a motion that Conservatives have put forward because enormous amount of taxpayers' dollars is being spent in a process that involves replacement workers being brought in and Conservatives are saying we need to see the contracts, not just we as parliamentarians but Canadians, the people we represent.
00:00:21.180 We're here representing people that have elected us that have a right to look at taxpayer and how their hard-earned tax dollars are being spent and what's been striking in the conversation at the committee up until now is that Liberals have been clear that that call for basic accountability is in their eyes political games, right?
00:00:49.480 The very existence of a parliamentary committee process looking for accountability, looking for information and documents is something that they consider a political game and that's obviously just nonsense.
00:01:07.340 It's kind of the kind of nonsense we hear typically from Liberals is that anything that we, anytime we're trying to hold the government accountable, a government that's clearly struggling in popular support, anytime we want to hold them accountable and get information to the public, they diminish that as insignificant or unimportant.
00:01:30.860 So we're saying we need to get these contracts.
00:01:35.860 Now, the Liberal member, Mr. Kuzmarachuk here, he made clear in his arguments that he doesn't think these documents should be provided.
00:01:45.860 Mr. Souza threw in that, oh, there's confidentiality involved and so forth.
00:01:51.860 He doesn't believe Canadians should be seeing these contracts.
00:01:54.860 So the Liberals have been clear about their position.
00:01:57.860 Conservatives believe that these documents, Canadians should see these documents.
00:02:03.860 Liberals believe that Canadians should not see these documents.
00:02:07.860 And I think the Bloc are with us as well in saying that these documents should be seen.
00:02:15.860 So the swing vote, in terms of the outcome of this, the swing vote is the NDP.