Western Standard - March 28, 2024


Smith says letter about City of Edmonton impropriety to remain sealed

Topics
Edmonton misconduct investigation
Mentioned
Rick McIver McHagher
Budget 2024 Funding for Acute Care and Surgical Initiative April 1st carbon tax protest at Parliament Hill

Episode Stats


Length

1 minute

Words per minute

193.77

Word count

307

Sentence count

20


Summary

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

The Alberta government has received a letter about allegations of wrongdoing within the City of Edmonton. Why hasn t the Alberta government released this letter? I spoke with Minister McHugh s team, and when I asked for the letter, the request was declined. Well, I understand the letter is written anonymously, and if you don't know who your source is, there's a level of due diligence that has to happen to determine whether the allegations are even true.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
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 So the Alberta government has received a letter about allegations of wrongdoing within the city of Edmonton.
00:00:04.560 Why has the Alberta government not released this letter?
00:00:06.300 I spoke with Minister McHagher's team, and when I asked for the letter, the request was declined.
00:00:12.020 Well, I understand the letter is written anonymously,
00:00:16.760 and if you're going to make serious allegations and you don't know who your source is,
00:00:23.320 there's a level of due diligence that has to happen to determine whether the allegations are even true.
00:00:28.220 So that would be one reason.
00:00:30.020 The other is that we do tend to like our municipalities to be self-governing,
00:00:35.780 and if there is an issue, we think the most appropriate body to deal with it is the city solicitor.
00:00:41.000 So you can maybe ask Rick McIver what he intends to do with that,
00:00:44.960 but I would be inclined to defer to the city to do the investigation.
00:00:50.300 Okay, and my follow-up question is on a similar topic.
00:00:53.460 So yesterday, Edmonton Mayor Emergeet Sohe downplayed the potential for provincial intervention
00:00:58.380 when it comes to the city of Edmonton and its finances and misconduct and all that.
00:01:02.340 What do you think about that?
00:01:03.960 We understand there's some serious issues that they're dealing with,
00:01:06.900 and if they would like our assistance in helping to manage that, then we're on standby.
00:01:12.560 At the moment, they haven't asked for assistance.
00:01:14.000 I've asked the Minister of Municipal Affairs to be in touch with them
00:01:18.200 to see if there's anything that he needs to be aware of
00:01:21.340 or if there's anything that he can do to help.
00:01:23.320 I don't believe that they've taken him up on that.
00:01:25.480 So, again, I defer to Minister of Municipal Affairs to see if he sees any reason to take it further.
00:01:30.780 Thank you.
00:01:31.060 Thank you.
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00:01:33.060 Thank you.
00:01:34.060 Thank you.