Western Standard - November 27, 2023


Former NDP Leader, Tom Muclair, talks about Alberta using the Sovereignty Act


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

205.16614

Word count

601

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that the federal government has jurisdiction over clean electricity in Ontario. Premier Danielle Smith says she may use the Act for the first time against federal clean electricity regulations. What does that mean for the Trudeau government and their clean electricity program?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
00:00:00.000 Premier Danielle Smith says she may use the act for the first time against federal clean
00:00:05.100 electricity regulations. What could that mean for the federal government and their clean
00:00:10.740 electricity program? It means that it's going to have to get settled by the courts, nothing more,
00:00:15.040 nothing less. I mean, the province of Quebec recently claimed that it could even change the
00:00:19.120 1867 British North America Act, the foundational part of our constitution. They could change it
00:00:24.920 unilaterally. They put in that French was the only official language of Quebec and that Quebec was
00:00:29.080 a nation. Mr. Trudeau didn't challenge that. What Premier Smith is doing right now is simply
00:00:34.900 saying, look, we've got jurisdiction as well and the courts are going to have to settle that. She 0.95
00:00:39.400 has an act of her legislature that she's going to use as the fulcrum to try to lean a little bit into 0.99
00:00:44.680 what the feds are going to do. But when Ontario got rid, for example, of its coal-fired plants with
00:00:50.220 which it was making electricity, it wasn't imposed on it by the feds. Here the federal government says
00:00:54.880 we have jurisdiction in the interest of future generations to do this. But recently, as we saw,
00:01:00.400 Rene, whether it was regard to a relatively small thing like single-use plastics and plastic straws,
00:01:05.440 the feds had overstepped the bounds. The legislation didn't allow them to define that as being toxic.
00:01:10.880 They didn't meet the test of their own legislation. And also there was a whole new part of the federal
00:01:17.360 government's environmental review process that was thrown out by the courts. So whether you're in the
00:01:21.920 Supreme Court of Canada or in the federal court, the federal government has been overreaching
00:01:26.240 because they're actually not opposing the goals. They're just saying they're coming too fast.
00:01:29.520 Instead of in the 2030s, they were hoping to get closer to 2050. So we'll see whether or not she's 0.74
00:01:35.840 successful in that. If Mr. Trudeau were smart about this, he would sit down and talk to her again. She
00:01:40.480 said in that same radio show that she actually hoped that that would have been possible and that she had
00:01:45.200 had some discussions at the beginning with Mr. Trudeau, but it seems to be in advance. By definition,
00:01:50.000 and the courts have confirmed this over and over and over again, it's a shared jurisdiction when
00:01:54.880 it comes to the environment. There's not one level of government that is in charge of the environment.
00:01:59.120 It's federal and provincial depending on the topic and so forth. So yes, there is a real chance that
00:02:04.880 other provinces will try to take a shot at some of this. And this is why, as you're putting it together,
00:02:10.960 you actually have to continue the conversations. Even if you're not going to agree, you at least have to
00:02:15.680 know where the resistance is going to be coming from. And I think that some of this is as blindsided
00:02:20.480 the Liberals because I don't think that they expected to lose that big case on environmental
00:02:24.160 review recently. And I know they certainly didn't expect to lose the case on plastics, but they've got
00:02:28.960 to respect the constitution. They've got to respect their own statute. That was the case of the
00:02:32.640 single-use plastics. They had regulations that didn't respect the law. So they're going to have to
00:02:36.960 start playing by the rules as well. Smith isn't, you know, isn't completely lost in her approach 0.99
00:02:43.200 here. She's got some solid backing by what's been happening in the courts. So we'll see how she
00:02:47.520 actually plays it out.