Western Standard - October 26, 2023


Smith says she wants to make Alberta most business friendly Canadian jurisdiction

Topics
equalization contributions
Mentioned
Justin Trudeau Twittersphere Goubeau Schultz Nigel Smith Corey
CMS： Canada has seen this kind of antisemitism before Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre responds

Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

158.59

Word count

682

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this week's episode, the boys discuss the latest in the ongoing battle between Alberta and the federal government over climate change and Alberta's new premier, Rachel Notley. They also discuss the impact of Alberta's decision to leave the Canada Pension Plan, and what that could mean for the rest of the country.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
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 There's no major announcements or anything like that.
00:00:02.560 It was basically a rundown on what she's accomplished in her first year,
00:00:09.100 saying that she wants to make Alberta the best place to do business in the country,
00:00:14.660 lowering taxes and red tape and all that sort of good stuff.
00:00:20.300 But, you know, some ominous warnings, too,
00:00:22.340 that she expects the battle with the feds to continue over their climate change plans.
00:00:28.660 So delivered to the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce before a packed house.
00:00:33.780 And, yeah, sadly, it didn't really have any big stuff in it, Nigel.
00:00:38.580 Well, it depends how you define big, doesn't it?
00:00:42.480 Huge, huge.
00:00:42.920 Actually, if you go out there and say that you are expecting the senior level of government
00:00:50.740 to do everything that it can to attack you and to undermine your purposes,
00:00:57.500 and you saying it are the premier of the province, that's pretty significant.
00:01:03.940 I mean, also, she's not wrong.
00:01:05.900 You can just watch what's going on in the Twittersphere between Environment Minister Goubeau
00:01:11.520 and our own provincial Minister Schultz.
00:01:16.720 You know, it's this endless one-upmanship.
00:01:21.500 But if you kind of take one step back from the actual issue of zero-emission grid by 2035,
00:01:31.300 which is what this is ostensibly all about,
00:01:34.260 take one step back from that,
00:01:36.160 how very convenient it is for Ottawa to have a Western bogeyman
00:01:40.840 as we are now just slightly less than two years from the next scheduled election.
00:01:47.240 They love us.
00:01:48.580 They're going to milk it to death. 0.99
00:01:50.440 You bet they're going to keep attacking,
00:01:51.880 and they're going to tell the people in central Canada and further east
00:01:56.360 that they're sticking up for you against the rebels in Alberta and possibly Saskatchewan as well.
00:02:04.940 Well, to be honest, that bogeyman goes both ways, though.
00:02:07.320 I mean, politically, it serves Premier Smith quite well to be able to have a foil in Ottawa
00:02:11.020 that you can always point to, the much-loathed Justin Trudeau,
00:02:14.760 and to keep telling voters we're going to stand up for you against the nasty socialists
00:02:21.540 or at least environmentally ideological government in Ottawa.
00:02:26.580 It's almost a, I know neither would like to ever admit it,
00:02:29.220 but they actually complement each other in the political sense.
00:02:32.780 Yeah, and Trudeau's plunging in the polls.
00:02:35.880 Nothing he does is right. 0.99
00:02:37.640 It all turns to crap these days. 0.93
00:02:39.400 So that's obviously going to be his major election issue. 0.99
00:02:42.300 He's going to pit Alberta as the bogeyman and the rest of Canada.
00:02:47.580 Government of Ontario today, Corey, wrote a letter to the Liberals saying,
00:02:53.040 you know, you've got to put a stop to this Alberta leaving the Canada pension plan
00:02:57.120 because it would hurt people in Ontario,
00:02:59.320 and it would hurt them in the pocketbooks by having to cover more of the premiums.
00:03:04.980 So Alberta as public enemy number one fits lovely for what Trudeau would like to see and do.
00:03:11.800 Yeah.
00:03:12.700 And that's actually going to be a tough one for Pierre Poliver to stick handle too, isn't it?
00:03:17.360 Yeah.
00:03:17.640 Well, he's already said that Alberta should stay,
00:03:20.160 so he's made his position pretty clear.
00:03:24.820 But, yeah, I think Ontario is just going to be the first of many provinces.
00:03:29.040 You know, Saskatchewan has said they're not overly enthused by it.
00:03:33.500 So I think Alberta could be sitting out there on its own for a while.
00:03:37.980 Well, it's been sitting out there on its own for a long time, actually.
00:03:42.580 It's got a new role for us.
00:03:44.040 Yeah, if you go to the numbers and you look at how much,
00:03:48.300 never mind the Canada pension plan just for a moment,
00:03:51.380 but just in terms of the over-contribution of revenues to the running of this country by Alberta,
00:03:59.080 I mean, it's a staggering amount of money.
00:04:01.240 I think it's something like $600 billion over 60 years or something, I'd say.
00:04:07.100 Yeah, to the equalization.
00:04:08.320 That's just the equalization.
00:04:09.500 We take everything.
00:04:11.420 I think it comes in close to $27 billion a year right now or something like that.
00:04:15.000 We're contributing more than we're getting back in services or transfers.