Western Standard - September 28, 2026


Should Alberta taxpayers cover temporary migrantsā€™ health careļ¼Ÿ

Hosted by
Corey Morgan
Mentioned
Smith Idiot
HANNAFORDļ¼š Carney has until Christmas to deliver the goods

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

186.48

Word count

482

Sentence count

23

Harmful content

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

3

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Let's talk about temporary migrants paying for their own health care. 1.00
00:00:04.080 It's been on the ballot for a while, but it made the news finally in the referendum
00:00:07.520 as Premier Smith sort of got a little more specific on what that might mean.
00:00:11.760 You know, Corey, I often wonder how these things even get to be controversial.
00:00:16.940 If you were to leave us behind and go and take a job in another country
00:00:21.040 and you didn't line up what you were going to do about health care first, 1.00
00:00:25.240 everybody would say you're an idiot. 1.00
00:00:26.620 Now, you know, people like us. 1.00
00:00:28.500 I'll say that anyways.
00:00:29.000 Well, no, no, they don't. They've got other names, but it's not. Idiot is seldom what I hear. But look, I mean, if you would go with a company or something like that, they take care of your health care needs for you. But if you don't, if you're just hopping the border and showing up, what is the argument that just because you're there that you should receive health care at somebody else's expense?
00:00:53.260 I don't think we expect that. Obviously, other people do and have been encouraged to.
00:01:00.900 But thank goodness that the Premier is saying, well, not only is that fundamentally flawed at a logical level,
00:01:08.600 but also on a purely practical basis, if the federal government has lost control of its own immigration system 0.98
00:01:15.000 and they're just shoveling newcomers with very few qualifications and papers out into the countryside
00:01:22.120 hoping that they'll find something somewhere. That's not actually an obligation on the Alberta
00:01:27.880 taxpayers, or for that matter, or the Saskatchewan taxpayers or the Ontario taxpayers or anyone else.
00:01:35.400 Obviously, we're not going to let somebody bleed to death in the street. That's just not who we are.
00:01:40.760 But the idea that somehow there should be an expectation around the world, if you could just
00:01:44.600 make it to Canada after that, they'll put your kids in school, they'll pay for your health bills,
00:01:49.880 they'll feed you if you're destitute, find you a place to live, put you up in a decent hotel until
00:01:54.440 they do. Why should the rest of the world be able to take that for granted? So bless the government
00:02:02.840 of Alberta for at least saying, well, we're not completely heartless, but we are heartless enough
00:02:09.880 to say that you better be here with a good reason, or an approved Alberta status.
00:02:17.640 Yeah, I think it's not an unreasonable ask. And actually, I've got a parallel whiff. I worked for a few years on an L1 visa down in the United States. And before I would cross that border, I purchased private insurance in case something catastrophic should happen. I mean, they wouldn't turn me away at a hospital if it did, but I could find myself with a six-finger bill when I got home if I didn't do such.