Western Standard - March 09, 2026


Should temporary workers pay for social programs？


Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

193.50443

Word count

284

Sentence count

5


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the idea that temporary workers in our province should pay for social services that they use, and why this is a silly, economically insane thing to do. We're not talking about citizens, we're talking about permanent residents that have paid taxes for years, and have been here as guests of our country.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 And what I mean by that is if you look at the referendum questions, we have to decide
00:00:04.560 when we're going to have temporary workers, temporary guests in our province pay for the
00:00:12.480 social services that they use. We're not talking about citizens. We're not talking about permanent
00:00:16.500 residents that have paid taxes for years and so forth. We're talking about people that are here
00:00:20.620 as guests of our country. And I mean, I don't know where you, Nigel, but when I go travel
00:00:27.200 somewhere or if i wanted to live somewhere for four months or a year or whatever it was i'm not
00:00:33.260 sure any albertan doing that would think that oh that government has a responsibility to pay for
00:00:38.320 my health care my education my social supports my my this that the other thing that would be
00:00:45.060 insane to think that of course that'd be i mean i i'd say that's unalbertan to think that and why
00:00:50.340 then do we do that on the other side of the ledger and say yeah come to alberta uh and the moment you
00:00:56.340 get here even though you haven't paid a lick of tax we're just going to give you all our social
00:01:00.000 program we'll take care of you that's that's a silly economically insane thing to do and it needs
00:01:06.980 to stop because if we keep doing it um all we're all we're doing is is what we're bankrupting
00:01:12.440 ourselves and it means poorer you know or more stressed programs education health care social
00:01:18.480 supports for those Albertans that have that are citizens that have been here uh for you know their
00:01:25.420 entire lives or a large portion of their lives paying taxes.