Western Standard - June 29, 2026


CORY MORGAN： Calgary didn’t become famous by apologizing for its cowboy culture

Mentioned
Deborah Yedlin Mardi Gras Derrick Bell
HANNAFORD： Bill C-34 is building Canada’s digital surveillance state Western Standard News Update ｜ Pierre Poilievre shakes up Conservative shadow cabinet ｜ 30 Jun 2026

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

188.04

Word count

987

Sentence count

37

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Calgary Stampede has been going on for almost a century. It s a state of mind that grasps the city for 11 days every year, and it s the envy of countless cities that can only dream of having such a distinct and ongoing event that takes over the entire city for a period of time. Unfortunately, to woke snobs, however, it s something shameful.

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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 i mean if you've been watching the news what's going on with uh what turned into a politicized
00:00:11.840 battle with well it's left versus right as usual it seems actually you know premier smith and other
00:00:17.280 conservatives saying that uh it's okay to have a party in the stampede and some others on the
00:00:23.600 other side saying no the city needs to crack down on the noise and such and i'll give it to rick
00:00:28.400 bell right in the middle complaining and curmudgeonly about the whole thing no matter what
00:00:31.520 at least he's consistent but it's an element of a bigger issue and calgary has a culture problem
00:00:38.240 and the problem isn't among the citizenry though it's it's in city hall where these
00:00:42.720 woke self-loathing souls have taken up habitation and they've been actively trying to undercut civic
00:00:48.080 pride and change the nature of the city they despise the agricultural and oil-filled roots
00:00:52.560 of the city and are incrementally trying to erase traces of them the calgary stampede is
00:00:57.200 just their latest target and they're not trying to regulate the nightlife out of the world acclaimed
00:01:02.140 party. Every city on earth has some sort of annual festival or fair but there's only a handful that
00:01:07.360 have unique events that take over the entire city for a period of time and Calgary is fortunate
00:01:11.620 enough to be one of those. The Calgary Stampede began as a rodeo but has become much more than
00:01:16.400 that. It also has a large exhibition in Midway but again the event is much more than that. It's a
00:01:22.200 state of mind that grasps the city for 11 days every year. People across the city dress in
00:01:27.020 western wear from the tasteful to the outright cheesy it doesn't really matter if a person's a
00:01:31.440 cowboy or not it's a period of good-natured fun cosplaying and people come from around the world
00:01:36.500 to take part in it even downtown in the corporate world it's been a long-standing tradition that
00:01:41.440 dress codes are relaxed during the stampede week and employees can wear denim the events go well
00:01:46.360 outside of the stampede grounds themselves pancake breakfasts barbecues parties held in every quarter
00:01:51.520 of the city and in people's homes businesses are decorated with hay bales and rail fences and
00:01:56.440 windows are painted with western and cowboy scenes. You can't walk a block in Calgary in any part of
00:02:01.460 town during Stampede Week without seeing evidence that the event is going on. Every bar tends into
00:02:06.480 a party hub during Stampede Week. Western bars such as the ranchmans have become legendary for
00:02:11.000 the Stampede parties held there. Downtown tents are erected with stages where live acts perform
00:02:16.980 and people party for every night of the event. Yes, it's just a giant piss-up for many people,
00:02:23.240 but that's part of the whole affair. I mean, should we pretend that Mardi Gras or Oktoberfest
00:02:27.500 are really any different? The Stampede brings in over $720 million in economic activity to
00:02:33.320 Alberta every year, and it's the envy of countless cities that can only dream of having such a
00:02:37.760 distinct and ongoing event. Unfortunately, to woke snobs, however, they see the Stampede as
00:02:42.820 something shameful. Look up Deborah Yedlin. She was complaining about the cowboy culture a few 0.70
00:02:47.840 years ago. That's the head of the Chamber of Commerce. They envision cowboys as hicks and
00:02:51.920 rodeos is primitive. They envision a city of coffee shops and art galleries unsullied by these
00:02:56.740 hundreds of thousands of partygoers, and these pompous, fun-hating fools are entrenched in 0.99
00:03:01.900 Calgary's City Hall. It really began during Nenshi's era and continued with Gondek. They began 0.98
00:03:06.640 filling the vacancies with woke hipsters and continued for over a decade. Now we're seeing 0.98
00:03:11.400 the fruits of all of that. Fort Calgary was renamed the Confluence, lest its proper name
00:03:16.100 offend an Indigenous person somewhere. They tried to cancel the fireworks at Fort Calgary as well
00:03:20.480 because they felt the city should be hanging its figurative head in shame
00:03:23.360 over the Kamloops residential school child burial hoax.
00:03:26.960 Calgary's slogan was changed from Heart of the New West,
00:03:29.440 because it was too Western, to be part of the energy.
00:03:32.080 But that referred to energy, so then they changed it to the
00:03:34.260 embarrassing and meaningless slogan of Blue Sky City.
00:03:38.100 It took them two steps, but they managed to eliminate references
00:03:40.980 to the West and oil field in a city slogan, and it was no mistake.
00:03:44.880 Now it's cracking down in the downtown partying.
00:03:48.040 Calgary City Hall is attacking a vital part of the whole affair, and they know it.
00:03:51.800 The young people coming to the Stampede are coming to party and to build memories.
00:03:55.000 If the lights are cut early and the sound is kept down, it isn't a party.
00:03:59.100 Out of 1.4 million people, just over 200 of them complained about the noise last year.
00:04:03.820 And City Hall felt that was enough to justify moving in.
00:04:06.100 Look, the Stampede's been happening for over 100 years,
00:04:08.300 and partying downtown's always been a part of that.
00:04:10.880 If it's really that onerous for a few people living near these event tents,
00:04:13.500 they shouldn't have chosen to live downtown.
00:04:15.320 It's like moving next to an airport and complaining about the planes.
00:04:17.500 take a week out of downtown and move to the suburbs then if it's that bad the battle brewing
00:04:22.740 over the party tents is much more than a small point of principle it's over the city taking a
00:04:26.780 big step towards killing a festival that made the city famous people have to push back and not let
00:04:31.840 these self-loathing calgarians work towards turning the calgary stampede into just another milquetoast 0.54
00:04:36.340 city fair rest assured the latte lappers in city hall won't stop with just the tents it's part of a 0.98
00:04:41.620 larger uglier plan and they can't be allowed to win here guys 0.99
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