Western Standard - June 27, 2025


Freeland, Smith, Gondek break ground on LRT Green Line

Mentioned
Danielle Smith Chrystia Freeland Jody Gondek
Canada is arming back up German politician's Alberta freedom tour

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

148.59

Word count

259

Sentence count

10


Summary

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

In this episode, we hear from Premier Danielle Smith about her meeting with the Treaty 8 Chiefs, and her response to their complaints about what they call "provincial overreach" in relation to the Green Line project in southeast Calgary.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.400 Well, this is the Western Standard reporting in southeast Calgary, where Minister Chrystia Freeland, Premier Danielle Smith, and Mayor Jody Gondek broke the ground to kick off the new green line down here in the southeast.
00:00:17.500 We say that the project is going to be ready in 2031, and it costs some $6 billion, with equal contributions federally, provincially, and municipally-er.
00:00:30.120 So, as you can check behind us, we see the cranes, and we see the shovels, and we saw the leaders put their shovels in the grout.
00:00:36.920 Afterwards, we had a chance to ask Premier Smith about the meeting that she had earlier this morning with the Treaty 8 chiefs, where they raised several complaints and pushed back against what they say is provincial overreach, and they say that their treaty is with the Crown and not the Covents, and therefore they don't have any authority under the Covents.
00:00:58.920 So, we asked Premier Smith when she thinks of this.
00:01:01.660 She says that she's willing to work together with the First Nations and discuss different instances of a referendum between the First Nations back in 2008 or 2009, I believe, where a referendum was dismissed.
00:01:15.900 However, it actually needed at that passing several years later in 2013.
00:01:21.760 So, she did say she was hopeful about progress while fully respecting jurisdiction.
00:01:26.900 She added that there are certain jurisdictions under the province, and that the Crown has, and even where the province is, beholden to the Crown in some blinks.
00:01:35.780 This is the Western Standard reporting for the Green Light.