Western Standard - August 31, 2026


Naheed Nenshi Wants Alberta’s Referendum Cancelled

Topics
referendum
Mentioned
Kiss
MARTY UP NORTH： The trade war exposes Alberta’s biggest problem with Canada The Bourbon & Harley Strategy： How Canada Fights Trump’s Tariffs

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

186.1

Word count

348

Sentence count

33

Harmful content

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
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 Elections Alberta, even if not efficiently, has been working on getting things together for this
00:00:05.500 referendum. And the head of the head of the head thinks we should just pull the plug on the thing
00:00:08.180 right now. Kiss my ass in the head. You know, it seems to be the term of the week. I want to put 1.00
00:00:12.580 that out there. What do you think you, who do you think you are? You're the leader of the opposition.
00:00:17.440 This is a democratic exercise. This is a legal exercise. This is under Elections Alberta. That's
00:00:23.680 like an opposition member saying, oh, look, my party's polling in the toilet in the polls. Thus,
00:00:28.760 let's just stop the election until my party does better. We don't cancel a referendum halfway
00:00:35.140 through a campaign because you don't like where it's going. Who the hell do you think you are? 0.98
00:00:41.660 Get out there, campaign, galvanize your supporters, and have the options you don't like voted down. 0.96
00:00:48.540 That's how democracy works. I know for socialists and self-serving knobs like you,
00:00:52.500 that's a little too hard to understand. But we don't cancel democratic exercises just because
00:00:58.560 the political weather changed over a trade war. You don't stop a referendum. And look at how
00:01:04.480 irresponsible that is. Thankfully, Albertans aren't as militant as Quebecers are, or have been.
00:01:12.480 Could you imagine what would happen if Quebec had had one of its referendums cancelled? Referenda,
00:01:18.900 that's the weird plural with it, sorry. Cancelled, though, halfway through. You know, if, say, in 1995,
00:01:23.940 they got close and they saw that the polls were getting too close, and somehow the federal
00:01:27.700 government intervened or somebody said, no, you're not allowed to have it. We're cancelling it.
00:01:32.300 BFLQ would come back. I mean, some extremists on the fringe of that movement, if you take away the
00:01:37.960 democratic ability to make change, people will seek non-democratic ways to make change. And
00:01:43.720 that's not good. And none of us want to go there. So quit being an idiot, Nenshi. Think a little
00:01:48.600 harder. And don't call for stupid things like that. 1.00