Western Standard - September 06, 2025


Danielle Smith press conference at the Canada Strong and Free Network Conference

Topics
youth unemployment
Mentioned
Michelle Rempel-Garner Pierre Poilievre Michael Binion Matt
Immigration, inflation and Canada's fading Carney romance Nihilism, reform, or revolution？ Young men in 2025

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

173.63

Word count

593

Sentence count

39

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Alberta s premier, Rachel Notley, sits down with Alberta s finance minister, Shep Miller, to discuss a variety of topics, including the province s youth unemployment crisis, the need for more agricultural workers, and the need to address the growing problem of youth unemployment.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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 We'll be announcing some policies next week to address the very serious crisis of youth unemployment.
00:00:06.740 Normally, youth unemployment, it's a few percentage points above the general unemployment rate.
00:00:12.860 Right now, it's at 17%. It should be more around 11 or 12%.
00:00:18.880 There's always reasons, because kids are students and that sort of thing.
00:00:21.760 There's always a reason why it's slightly higher, but it is massively higher.
00:00:25.300 So we know that there has to be a connection between these things, because we're hearing the stories of the kids who put out dozens of resumes and don't get a call back.
00:00:34.580 And we're seeing Michelle Rempel do some great work, where she is showing how fast food jobs, which used to be the very first place a kid would get their first job, are preferring to hire temporary foreign workers rather than hire locally.
00:00:47.960 So it's out of balance. We know that agriculture is an area that needs to be exempted.
00:00:54.480 And those are true seasonal workers. And many of those are also high-skilled labor and higher-paid laborers.
00:01:00.900 It really is the low-income worker that is competing with kids for their first job. 0.94
00:01:06.840 That's what we've got to get a rein on.
00:01:08.880 So I'm glad to see that Pierre Pollyov is pushing the envelope. I think we've got to rein that in.
00:01:14.380 So I want to have a question about Western separation sentiment and a potential right crime. How soon do you see that in the ballot?
00:01:26.380 It depends on what happens with the petition campaign. There is currently a petition campaign that has been launched asking if you want to remain in Canada, yes or no.
00:01:37.380 And so I'm waiting to see what happens with the collection of those signatures.
00:01:42.520 If they are successful, because the period of time under the old rules, they have to collect, I think, 293,000 signatures by the end of October,
00:01:52.400 then we'd be looking probably in the spring for a vote of the people.
00:01:58.720 I had a chance to give you a question, Matt, and recently we were talking about a sovereign nation versus sovereignty within Canada itself. What are your thoughts on that?
00:02:08.080 I've always been supportive of Alberta's sovereignty within a united Canada.
00:02:12.000 That has been the framework that I've, going back to my very first bill, which was named Alberta's sovereignty within a united Canada.
00:02:19.680 We're doing this Alberta next panel, and Michael Binion, who I believe is a founder here, he is on the panel.
00:02:26.140 And one of the things he talks about is responsible government, that what happens in a responsible government is that you take on more duties as you develop more capacity to administer those programs.
00:02:37.560 So maybe when we were bankrupt in the 1930s, maybe we couldn't have taken over all of the programs that Quebec has.
00:02:45.740 But now that we are the third most powerful economy in the country, five million people strong, maybe it is time for us to do as Quebec has and have our own personal income tax collection,
00:02:56.980 our own provincial police, our own pension, our own control over immigration, and a few other things.
00:03:02.200 That's what we're consulting on right now.
00:03:03.920 So we're getting some interesting feedback on our surveys and at our town halls, but that consultation process finishes October the 1st,
00:03:11.600 and then we'll convene as a committee and make some recommendations about the path forward.
00:03:17.360 Any more questions from the right side over here?
00:03:20.140 Yes? No? No questions?
00:03:22.700 And we're all done for a few weeks.
00:03:24.160 Awesome. Thanks, everyone.