Western Standard - November 20, 2025


In case you missed it: Premier Smith Stresses Urgency to Reach Pipeline Agreement with Ottawa


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

186.03827

Word count

350

Sentence count

14


Summary

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

The Western Standard's Leah Muschett talks to Alberta's premier, Rachel Notley, about her demands for the government to come to a deal on the bitumen pipeline to Asia, the Pathways Project, and the nine federal laws that she says are impeding Alberta's energy sector.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Hi there. My name is Leah Muschett for the Western Standard.
00:00:03.200 Actually, my question is for Premier Smith.
00:00:06.500 So basically, the nine federal laws that you said were impeding on oil and in the oil and gas sector,
00:00:13.460 you said your deadline was Sunday, so for the Grey Cup.
00:00:17.740 Since it seems like the federal government is not going to meet your demands,
00:00:22.260 what are you going to do in response to that?
00:00:23.940 We're still hopeful that in the next few days, we'll be able to announce that we've come to an agreement
00:00:30.720 on a memorandum of understanding that not only addresses the need for a bitumen pipeline to Asian markets,
00:00:36.900 but the Pathways Project and addressing substantially the nine bad laws that are impairing our investment climate.
00:00:42.840 We've been going back and forth in some detail over many, many hours over the last couple of weeks,
00:00:48.380 but I would say that we just need to give it a few more days to iron out a few more details,
00:00:53.120 and if we have something to report, we will let you know.
00:00:58.320 Okay, and I guess to go along with that, do you think if you do announce something, it'll be pretty soon?
00:01:06.040 It would, I would say before the, it has to be before the end of the month.
00:01:10.800 The Prime Minister, I've made it pretty clear to him that there's an urgency to coming to terms on these issues.
00:01:17.960 We know that there are a number of different projects, whether they're AI data centers,
00:01:22.760 or whether it's the expansions that have been announced of existing pipelines and oil sands projects.
00:01:29.680 They need some certainty of knowing what the future is going to look like.
00:01:32.680 So I think in anticipation of that, we're beginning to see the kind of projects
00:01:37.000 that the private sector would put on the table if we can get some certainty.
00:01:40.580 And so I would say I was hoping for Grey Cup, but if it takes just a few more days,
00:01:47.520 then I think that Albertans will be satisfied with that.
00:01:51.920 Okay, thank you.
00:01:52.560 Yeah.