Western Standard - August 17, 2026


Cory Morgan： The Senate is still wasting your money

Mentioned
Raymond Gagne
MARTY UP NORTH： Can Ottawa strike a tariff deal in time？ Why won’t Canada deport high-risk non-citizen criminals？

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

179.26

Word count

382

Sentence count

31

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged


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 .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's have a look into how well our federal government is spending our money.
00:00:02.640 Let's just pivot a little bit, you know, some happy news.
00:00:04.900 This one's in the Western Standard.
00:00:06.620 The Senate Speaker, her name is Raymond Gagne.
00:00:12.760 I don't know.
00:00:13.340 I can't pronounce some French names.
00:00:14.300 You know, says so much.
00:00:17.140 Who knew what the name of the Speaker was in the first place?
00:00:20.940 Nobody.
00:00:21.540 Because it's the Senate.
00:00:22.320 They don't do anything. 1.00
00:00:23.300 They're useless. 1.00
00:00:23.880 It's a patronage pit. 1.00
00:00:25.260 It's just somewhere you stick people because you owe them a political favor.
00:00:29.720 they get a good pension and don't have to work very hard and get a massive salary. Well,
00:00:33.800 she has billed taxpayers for $875,000 for international travel. The Taxpayers Federation
00:00:42.260 found this since she was appointed three years ago. $300,000 in travel. I mean, this is on top
00:00:48.740 of all the hundreds of thousands they take out of us and everything else. $300,000 in three years
00:00:53.420 for a person that nobody in canada has ever heard of much less anybody overseas what purpose do we
00:01:01.100 have to send a senator out of canada as the speaker of the senate none this is just more of the gravy
00:01:09.420 train for them and how on earth what sort of five-star hotels and platinum treatment are you
00:01:15.100 getting to run up a bill like that you know what the consequences are going to be for her for that 0.66
00:01:19.860 None.
00:01:20.920 Nothing.
00:01:21.880 We're continuing to take it up the keister, guys.
00:01:25.240 This country is ripping you off.
00:01:27.180 Your work, your taxes, the stuff you see coming out, this is what it goes towards.
00:01:31.680 This is what it goes towards.
00:01:32.540 You know, even the prime minister, when he has, what, single flights where there's 100 and some thousand just in food costs
00:01:37.620 so he can treat all his friends to the most expensive of possible foods.
00:01:43.880 But at least I understand why a prime minister has to travel.
00:01:46.880 I understand why a prime minister can't fly coach. 0.65
00:01:50.080 I understand why it'll cost more than your typical flight, though that's still above and beyond, and it's ridiculous.
00:01:56.040 But I can understand that.
00:01:57.220 There's no damn reason the Speaker of the Senate should be costing just under $300,000 a year for travel expenses.
00:02:07.200 Come on. 0.65