Western Standard - May 15, 2026


Smith says pipeline delays helped fuel Alberta independence momentum


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

175.90395

Word count

420

Sentence count

13


Summary

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

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Okay, and do you think if Ottawa had approved a pipeline years ago, the independence movement would be where it's at now in terms of momentum?
00:00:07.660 Well, as I said, it's vitally important that this deal was signed because I think there's a number of decisions the federal government made that ended up eroding confidence.
00:00:18.440 And it's not just about getting a pipeline built. It was that they took away aspirationally of us ever getting another pipeline to be built ever again.
00:00:30.000 because we do have trans mountain pipeline we do have coastal gas link which is expanding
00:00:34.160 in natural gas but essentially staring into a future where not only we would never be able to
00:00:40.000 build another pipeline but we'd have to start shutting in our existing production which is what
00:00:45.360 several independent consultant reports said by 2 million barrels a day by 2035 and all of the
00:00:50.960 impact that would have on our finances on our taxes on our ability to pay for services that
00:00:56.160 it was that combination of packages. Same thing with the net zero power rigs. That may in fact
00:01:01.840 be the biggest thing that came out of our early MOU. And the announcement you saw the Prime
00:01:07.420 Minister make earlier in the week that natural gas, yes, has to be part of our electricity grid
00:01:12.240 in order to be able to provide stability. 90% of our daily use of power typically comes from
00:01:18.740 natural gas. And we've already paid billions of dollars to switch from coal. We know that solar,
00:01:25.160 wind and batteries are not able to continue fueling our continued growth so that to me
00:01:31.040 getting having that limitation was also causing some of the frustration frankly I've also mentioned
00:01:37.420 to the prime minister people are frustrated at immigration policy that took place under his
00:01:42.120 predecessor I'm glad to see that he's making some changes there and a lot of the separatist movement
00:01:47.160 is being fueled by those who are law-abiding gun owners who are going to be made criminals by the
00:01:52.260 existing federal firearms bans on guns that come into effect in October. So I think that this will
00:01:58.700 help a lot towards a group of folks who were disaffected because of economic issues. I think
00:02:04.880 some of the changes on immigration that we're going to be proposing in the fall will also help
00:02:09.500 address some of the concerns, but I still think there's some other outstanding issues,
00:02:13.340 and in particular the gun issue I think is a big one.
00:02:22.260 Amen.