Western Standard - March 20, 2026


Memorial for Kamloops 'graves' takes place at Fort Calgary


Episode Stats

Length

6 minutes

Words per Minute

139.39394

Word Count

920

Sentence Count

62

Misogynist Sentences

2

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello everyone, my name is Leah Musche for the Western Standard. We're here today at the Walk
00:00:04.640 With Us ceremony that was held this morning at City Hall in Calgary. We saw a bunch of people
00:00:11.280 speaking. Now there was already a ceremonial walk that you'll get to see a little bit. We
00:00:16.540 interviewed some people including Frances Widowson as well as protests involving her.
00:00:30.000 Open the hearts for kindness and love.
00:00:33.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:00:34.000 That's what it is.
00:00:36.000 Yeah, you can do it over there.
00:00:38.000 You can do it over there.
00:00:40.000 You're perpetrating harm against our people.
00:00:43.000 You can do it over there.
00:00:45.000 Don't even ask a stupid question like that.
00:00:48.000 You're bringing marshmallows over there.
00:00:51.000 Don't stand over there.
00:01:00.000 I am going to say that that's not going to happen anymore.
00:01:30.000 So you were obviously very visibly upset at Frances's demonstration over there.
00:01:40.040 What is it that's so upsetting to you about what she's saying?
00:01:43.100 It's not about what she says or what she's doing.
00:01:46.680 It's about bringing and perpetrating harm against our people.
00:01:50.800 Because what follows her? Nothing but negativity and racism.
00:01:54.040 So then that puts harm upon our people.
00:01:59.120 So I don't know what her intentions are or why she's even here.
00:02:04.500 You know, the truth is always going to be the truth.
00:02:29.120 your piece is a shit your piece is a shit you're hurting people and you come out to do it anyways
00:02:35.420 no but she does you came to talk to me i was talking to her
00:02:40.500 you came to talk to me you asked me is it not
00:02:47.060 in favor that's bullshit bullshit because you're hurting people free speech comes with responsibility
00:02:57.960 Free space comes with responsibility.
00:02:59.680 And you're not going to deny that you're hurting all of these people here?
00:03:03.660 I don't want you in my community.
00:03:06.640 I don't want to listen to what he has to say.
00:03:08.720 What he has to say is irrelevant.
00:03:12.880 The reason I'm here is I want to talk to people.
00:03:15.960 I want to help people or witness what's going on with Francis
00:03:20.300 and then engage in free dialogue with people.
00:03:22.520 And I think that that's important.
00:03:23.620 If we lose that in society, that there's something sacred that's lost.
00:03:29.620 It doesn't allow us to operate as a society very well.
00:03:35.020 So you see you're more here as just a freedom of speech advocate
00:03:37.700 rather than supportive of anything that Francis is promoting?
00:03:41.180 Or would you say that you are in agreement?
00:03:43.080 I mean, insofar as we're having this conversation,
00:03:46.220 the primary reason for me being here is for free speech.
00:03:52.140 That's what I'm focused on.
00:03:53.420 And whether I agree or disagree with Francis, it's irrelevant to that point, right?
00:03:58.180 Okay, yeah.
00:03:58.940 Yeah, so that's what I'm focused on, is just, you know, supporting people's ability to speak freely.
00:04:05.220 And I think that that's really important.
00:04:09.700 I'm here to draw attention to the falsehoods that have been perpetuated by this sign
00:04:15.020 and are going to be continuing with this march,
00:04:17.460 which is that the remains of 215 children have been confirmed
00:04:21.800 at the former Kamloops Senior Residential School, which is not true.
00:04:25.980 And you've done, like, a lot of work on this.
00:04:28.220 You were even fired from Mount Royal because of the fact that you said
00:04:32.420 that there was no graves and stuff like that.
00:04:35.980 So why don't you talk a little bit, I guess,
00:04:37.880 about why you think this is such an important issue to protest about.
00:04:42.940 Sorry. First of all, I should say I wasn't fired because of the claim about the...
00:04:46.640 It was about satirizing the idea that the residential schools were genocidal.
00:04:52.820 It's related.
00:04:53.960 That was certainly an unpopular thing for me to be saying.
00:04:56.680 Sorry, could you just repeat the question?
00:04:58.160 So why do you think it's such an important issue to protest about?
00:05:01.400 Because I think that in a democratic society, it's important to be able to state facts.
00:05:06.800 And this is a fact that we cannot state.
00:05:09.060 And if you're unable to state facts, then we are heading towards a totalitarian society.
00:05:15.060 As George Orwell said, 2 plus 2 make 4. Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 plus 2 make 4. If that is granted, all else follows. We cannot say that 2 plus 2 make 4 right now.
00:05:28.160 And also the police were talking to you prior to the event, before it started. So why don't you tell me a little bit about what they were telling you?
00:05:35.800 So the Calgary police, I have never seen such a professional police force
00:05:41.020 in all of my dealings with these kinds of protests.
00:05:45.020 They have been working for a few days just to make sure
00:05:47.500 that there was a kind of agreeable solution to all parties.
00:05:52.500 And so we discussed what I was all about.
00:05:55.200 And I was saying, I'm not disrupting, I'm not protesting.
00:05:58.020 I'm just asking this question because of the falsehoods that are being spread.
00:06:02.300 and I'm going to just stand, I want to be part of this event
00:06:05.340 in that I want people to be aware of me having this dissenting position
00:06:10.980 and I'm not going to disrupt and they said fine
00:06:14.200 and they were going to intervene if there was any hint of violence that might happen.
00:06:21.380 And it came a little bit close sometimes
00:06:24.400 but it was nothing that was too much.
00:06:30.260 but one time a guy was screaming in my face and so they came and told him to just move away.