Western Standard - October 26, 2021


Equalization referendum passes by 62%

Topics
equalization referendum results
Mentioned
Kevin Lacey Trudeau Elections Alberta Jason Kenney
AHS drops 26,000+ employees from vaccination rate tracking The Pipeline： Greenpeace extremist appointed environment minister, Equalization referendum ignored

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

131.65

Word count

296

Sentence count

20


Summary

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

A total of 1,092,639 Albertans voted in a referendum on equalization, and most voted to keep the current formula that has seen billions of dollars sent out of Alberta to other provinces. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the premiers to begin negotiations.

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 Hello. I'm Dave Kneeler, the news editor of the Western Standard. Albertans have said
00:00:12.720 they want equalization taken out of the Canadian Constitution. On Tuesday, Elections Alberta
00:00:18.120 released the results of the October 18th ballot with 61.7% of people voting yes. 38% of people
00:00:26.280 voted to keep the formula that has seen billions of dollars stream of Alberta to other provinces.
00:00:31.440 The referendum question was, should Section 36 of the Constitution Act 1982, Parliament
00:00:39.720 and the Government of Canada's commitment to the principle of making equalization payments,
00:00:44.400 be removed from the Constitution? A total of 1,092,639 Albertans voted in the referendum.
00:00:53.160 There were 50,969 rejected ballots and 49,336 blank ones. Premier Jason Kenney described the vote as
00:01:04.320 a powerful statement. Quote, the Feds have an obligation to take it seriously and negotiate
00:01:09.780 with us, said Kenney, calling on the Feds to, quote, demonstrate respect for the principle
00:01:14.280 of democracy. The Canadian Taxpayers Federation is calling on Prime Minister Trudeau and the
00:01:19.680 Premiers to begin negotiations on equalization. Quote, Albertans have gone to the polls and sent
00:01:25.500 a clear message that equalization isn't working and it's time for reform, said Kevin Lacey,
00:01:30.960 the Alberta director of the CTF. Quote, Albertans clearly said they want a better deal from the
00:01:36.540 federal government. Trudeau shouldn't ignore the 642,000 Albertans who went to the polls and voted for a
00:01:43.320 fair deal. In 2018, the equalization formula was renewed by an act of parliament. It expires in
00:01:50.700 March 31, 2024. Quote, the window of opportunity for reforming equalization is right now. The referendum
00:01:59.220 has given Alberta's position a big boost, said Lacey. If you'd like to see how your area voted on
00:02:05.940 equalization, just go to our website, westernstandardonline.com and follow the links. For the Western Standard,
00:02:13.620 I'm Dave Naylor.